by Aoife Donnellan // May 15, 2026
Ireland’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, situated in the Arsenale, presents ‘Dreamshook’ by Isabel Nolan, curated by Georgina Jackson with The Douglas Hyde. Inspired by the work of the 11th-century figure Aldo Manuzio (also known as Aldus Manutius), an Italian printer and creator of the enchiridion, a precursor to the modern paperback book, Nolan investigates the moral qualities of Manuzio’s dream to disseminate literature to a wide audience. In her essay ‘Imagine feeling optimistic,’ Nolan asks if “the power of a dream is in its capacity to inconvenience reality.” The exhibition explores the agency of dreams, using the dream as a throughline to question the beliefs around which the world structures itself. Through her hand-tufted tapestries, pencil drawings and colorful sculptures, Nolan creates a surreal bedroom scene that pulls at the edges of our assumed shared reality. At the Biennale preview, we spoke about dreams, the invention of secularism and religious imagery.
Isabel Nolan, portrait // Photo by Silke Briel
Aoife Donnellan: There are so many references in the work; religion, permeability, literature, history. How did you go about researching the work that came to be?
Isabel Nolan: I think using research as a verb is probably a little bit more deliberate than the way that I work. In retrospect, the thing that really kicked things off is that I started wondering about the origin of the idea of the secular. Having grown up in a fairly standard Catholic upbringing in Ireland, I always had this notion that the secular is this space for the agnostic, and it’s a space for thought outside of the realm of God and things like that. I learned that the secular is an idea from a pope in the 11th century. The whole thing is basically a power grab going on between the pope and various sorts of Holy Roman emperors or kings.
Something that I’ve always been really interested in is the way in which Christianity has quietly shaped the society that we live in. In some ways, it’s very explicit and we’re really aware of it, but in a lot of other ways, it’s not. It has this tacit, hidden, pulsating presence that has patterned the Western world. The thing that has always fascinated me is the frameworks that humans have constructed in order to explain the world to ourselves and explain our place here. So at times I’ve been really interested in a scientific moment, like the idea of dark matter. Or, at other times, I’m looking at a kind of a religious figure or an event or something that allows us to engage with and structure and make sense of reality. In a way, I think this exhibition then became about how literature and art shape our relationship to the world at a particular moment in time.
Isabel Nolan: ‘Dreamshook,’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Isabel Nolan: ‘Make Haste Slowly,’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026 // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
AD: How did you come across Aldo Manuzio? And how did you locate the idea of hope in the book as an image in the work?
IN: Out of that 11th century moment emerges this history of a humanist education, with somebody like Aldo Manuzio. There’s a quote from Manuzio talking about “how we live in turbid, tumultuous and tragic times,” that whole period of time which was beset by plague and famine and warfare. The thing that I was particularly interested in is this crisis of authority. Do you want a militaristic warlord who is the Holy Roman Emperor ruling your life? Or do you want to look to the papacy for the kind of authority of what it means to be a good human in the world? And then you have this group of people who emerge who are saying maybe there’s another way to look at things; maybe we can look back to the classical past and find a way of engaging with the world and engaging with the reality of life. That is about how to be a good person and how to live in the world well. It’s not how to please God and how to get into heaven or how to appease the warlord, it’s about what might be the moral duty of a human.
I have such a catastrophic imagination, so I think that I was just struck by the idea that you’ve just seen your life and your world ravaged constantly by death and disease and war. Venice is founded by refugees who are getting out of northern Italy because there’s this fighting going on all the time and they want to have a quiet life. So they go and live in a lagoon. I think I was struck by that capacity that people have for optimism and also for belief, whether somebody’s commitment is to a scientific theory that proves to be fallacious or to a worldview that basically supports their own ideology. I guess it’s a slightly romantic attachment to literature.
Isabel Nolan: ‘Oh!,’ 2026, and ‘Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Good Books,’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026 // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
AD: The topics you’re dealing with are enormous and also minute. The graphite impressions in your drawings and the large, sturdy metal structures. Everything is both absolute and transient. Can you elaborate on that tension between the materiality of your work and the themes of your work in relation to scale?
IN: I’m really interested in the large scale of human experience. An awful lot of time, in different bodies of work, I’ve alluded to deep time. The sun is always there in the work in a way that for me is the facticity of our lives on a little lone planet dominated by this single sun, that determines a lot about the way we can live and survive in this world.
There’s something about seeing things long scale, that sense of civilization rising and falling. I think life always feels contingent and precarious…that sense of the large and the small. It’s probably something I’ve said a lot: intimacy is the way into a large idea.
Isabel Nolan: ‘Miracle of the child saved (San Clemente),’ 2026, and ‘Dreamstrife,’ 2026, ‘From the bottom of the sea,’ 2026, ‘Point of View,’ 2026, and ‘Boccaccio’s Dream of Petrarch (After the Master of Boucicaut),’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026 // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
AD: With this redefinition of the secular, the tapestries in particular, have a lot of religious imagery. How do you think about that, about reproducing religious imagery with this different idea of secularism?
IN: In a way, the secular is entirely informed by Christian thought and principles. Whereas in other world religions, there isn’t that separation of domains. So it is a really particular thing to Western culture. It’s also what’s available. I call it theft and tribute. As a species, we’re really good at weaponizing imagery and form and space in order to communicate a certain ideology. So something like a Gothic church, I just think is the most extraordinary achievement. It’s made to these ends that have all kinds of troubling, alienating and dark histories as well as beautiful intentions. I like reusing the imagery and making it my own: to utilize and instrumentalize that imagery in strange ways.
It also felt to me that the consequence of this dream, of people like Aldo, wasn’t just the scientific method and the enlightenment and Shakespeare’s plays and things that people always list that emerged out of humanist education. It’s also a class of white male Christian patriarchs who are convinced of their own authority, expertise and dominion over the world. That was what it felt to me to have this kind of crazy, bonkers Christian seraphim creature who is holding up these books to the light and is sustained within the light. Then underneath this, this tumultuous storm taking place and other winged books, my very corny winged books are drowning, and being consigned to the depths. It relates also to this sense of the accumulation of history. You have these books that are lost, but also still in the soil. You want it to operate in a way that it’s engaging and puzzling at the same time.
Isabel Nolan: ‘The Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters (the Seraphim of the Canon),’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026 // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
AD: Engaging and puzzling is a great phrase. Was it important for you to bring optimism in at this moment?
IN: I became quite preoccupied by the idea of optimism and capacity. I write quite a lot. And I mean, pretty much everything I ever write is about how we are a terrible species, but we might as well make art because we’re all going to die. There’s something about that bloody-mindedness and that capacity that we have for finding a new way to be in the world or a new idea or a small thing to hang on to.
I think what I would call it the feeling of continuity with the world. I find it through art and I find it through literature. I find it in other ways, of course. I think there’s something quite magical about that. Because the show is in Venice and partly because I’m so interested in Italian culture and history, I really wanted to consider the capacity that art might have to be a space where optimism can inconvenience the fucking shit-show that so many people are living through, or witnessing.
Exhibition Info
Irish Pavilion
Isabel Nolan: ‘Dreamshook’
Exhibition: May 9–Nov. 22, 2026
irelandatvenice2026.ie
Artiglierie dell’Arsenale, Campo Della Tana 2169F, Venice 30122 click here for map
