Tucked away off Dawson Street on Anne’s Lane, the Kerlin Gallery is one of Dublin’s most consistent galleries when it comes to showing relevant contemporary Irish artists. Currently, Isabel Nolan’s exhibition Bent Knees are a Give is installed in its pristine confines. Following a show in IMMA last year which explored light as a metaphor in everyday human thought, Nolan returns with a body of work pertaining to John Donne, the 16th century poet and cleric. Focussing on a memorial statue which Donne himself posed for prior to his death in 1632, Nolan’s research seeks to understand Donne’s varying representations in stone and print, which portray his calm acceptance of death and his anticipation of eventual resurrection. Consisting of delicate colouring pencil drawings, towering flagpoles, an accompanying text, and corroborating photographic prints, the exhibition cohesively reveals the aesthetic and theoretical links between Nolan’s work and Donne’s cryptic representation.
Bent is a set of four framed colouring pencil drawings each rendered in different bright colour palettes. The first drawing depicts St. Jerome removing a thorn from a lion’s paw in a yellowy-orange hue. Reminiscent of the prevailing flat-but-not-quite style of 14th century proto-Renaissance painting, this image has hints of three dimensionality and perspective blending out from the half-drawn architecture in the background. Realised in vibrant pinks, the second drawing diverts away from the sacred towards the intimate and the personal. A foot rests gently on a bent knee in this snapshot-like image; the composition is exceptionally human against the grand religious imagery prevalent elsewhere in the show.
In a momentary aberration, Nolan’s restrained sketch-like style reaches a logical maximal conclusion in the third drawing. The drawn lines encompass the entire rectangular boundary of the image; they drip from the flat expanse of this peculiar cosmic, floral drawing, as if put through an image processing filter. Returning to the minimal sketched style of the others, the fourth image is an observational drawing of John Donne’s statue at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. The murky green palette of this final drawing recalls the sober officiating textbook colours of school curricula past; its overall tone brings to mind the reproduced images from old art history books, which John Donne’s marble head would comfortably fit alongside.
Lining the walls, the most immediately dominating works in the show are Nolan’s colourful draped cotton flags. The first, Fresh disorder diminishing energy, hangs lowest due to the severity of the bend in the flagpole’s steel tubing, a witty nod to Donne’s sculpted marble knees. From a near 90 degree angle, two cotton sheets, crimped at the top by steel clothes pegs, extend down to the buffered concrete floor. On one side a peachy-red dye drains into a faded yellow patch, before the cotton turns white as it runs along the ground. An astral splattering of pale red dye flows down across the threshold where the cotton bends and folds in on itself, like a garment hanging from a bed, clutching at the floor. On the alternate side, a harsh red is cut into by a textured violet pattern, oddly reminiscent of the clean half-abstracted dye patterns of 1970s interiors.
In the second flag installation, Hungry and Thirsty. Sorry and Angry. A Flag for John Donne, the translucency of the cotton fabric becomes more apparent as the under-layers of the drapery begin to appear beneath and stain the clean white fabric above. The neutral shades of faded pink and earthy brown compliment the tranquil etched portrait of John Donne emblazoned on an attached sheet of cotton. This sheet sags, forming a loose concave chasm in between the two steel pegs used to fasten it in place. The emblazoned image, based off a drawing made prior to Donne’s death, shows a frail Donne under the swathing fabric clot of his headdress; his eyes are closed and his lips are pursed tensely. His image here, as Nolan notes in her text, is far removed from the ‘youthful, handsome, debonairly bearded, even smug visage’ of the memorial statue.
The statue, although being the theoretical driving force behind the show, emerges in Nolan’s printed photographs as shrouded and obscured. The first print I am wonderfully and fearfully made shows a detail of the funeral urn on which Donne stands with the marble fabric curling and folding around his feet. The second, For ever and ever, and infinite and super infinite for evers captures the marble folds of Donne’s sculpted garb and his bent knees hidden therein. Severing segments from the statue and displaying them in this straightforward way instils them with a forensic quality; they are documentary evidence first, art object second. These photographic prints encapsulate Nolan’s systematic approach to researching, making, and exhibiting.
Despite dealing with the serious questions of mortality, resurrection, and faith, the exhibition has an underlying tone of playfulness heralded by the experimental approach to the objects’ making and the radiant colours used in their realisation. Facing away from the approaching viewer is a sculpture of a lion made from papier-mâché; a bronze thorn pierces his outstretched paw. The yellow strips of papier-mâché layer into a textured camouflage which plasters his oversized head and askew cartoon body, whose tail lies severed on the floor.
Alongside him on the nearby wall hangs Lion with thorn (after Lippi), an oil pastel piece drawn with the same implicitly religious composition of Nolan’s colouring pencil drawings in Bent. Borrowing the same image of St. Jerome, the drawing’s weighted gestures recall the contrasted shadowy folds of the flag pole installations. The drawing highlights oil pastel’s ability to be layered over and covered, as with the folds in both Nolan’s drapes, as well as the folds of Donne’s marble garb.
The show is underpinned by many subtle links between the theoretical focuses of the show, and the materials and forms of the work displayed. Nolan offers just enough clues to help the audience begin understanding, but shrouds the deeper revelations in ambiguity: ambiguity which cleverly reflects the uncertainty surrounding John Donne’s marble staging.
Isabel Nolan’s Bent Knees are a Give runs at Kerlin Gallery until Saturday 16th May.
Words: Aidan Wall
