Isabel Nolan's Dreamshook
“We know by what we share in, not just by what we analyse”
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Isabel Nolan's Dreamshook, Irish Pavillion, 61st Venice Biennale 2026
Posted August 13, 2026
The Irish artist Isabel Nolan (b. 1974) is one of the more challenging creators in the world of modern art. Her works incorporate sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, and writing. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures. Most recently, she represented Ireland at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Her Dreamshook installation (above) - titled to evoke a state of being shaken by dreams - garnered critical acclaim for its intellectual depth, material richness, and emotional subtlety and as one of the Biennale’s most thoughtful and "conceptually coherent" national presentations.[1, 2]
Dreamshook includes fourteen sculptures, drawings, and tufted tapestries, all of which symbolically and poetically explore the life and work of the Venetian printer and publisher Aldo Manuzio (ca. 1450–1515). It is an artistic distillation of how knowledge is a process of shared experience when an individual’s dream becomes a communal reality. Manuzio's "dream" was a plentiful supply of books and the democratization of reading. He wished to make knowledge more portable and accessible. Besides inventing italics and the semicolon, he pioneered pocket-sized books. Before Manuzio introduced his design of a light book that could fit comfortably in one's hand, books were not made for casual, portable reading. They were expensive, heavy, and meant to be used at a lectern or desk. Manuzio’s dream was an extension of the Renaissance project of spreading literacy and humanist thought [2, 3]
How do the various elements of Isabel Nolan's masterwork tell this story?
In Dreamshook’s arched centerpiece (enlarged below), the vibrantly colored, hand-tufted textile tapestry Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Good Books tells the story of Manuzio’s efforts to clarify the written word. The tapestry title directly references a quote by the legendary 15th-century Venetian Renaissance printer and humanist, Aldo Manuzio (Aldus Manutius). In 1495, amid regional warfare, Aldus wrote: "It is our lot to live in turbid, tragic and tumultuous times... and yet I shall have no rest until I have created a plentiful supply of good books."
In it, Manuzio figures as both asleep under a checked duvet—a church key dangling from his wrist on a red string—and awake and reading at the bed’s edge. A swirl of open books is at his fingertips, but behind a translucent yellow curtain, while a winged, harp-playing angel steps on a pile of books on the left. This scene takes place in a Venetian dwelling overlooked by a farmhouse under a starry night. [2]
There are two smaller works flanking the central tapestry - Make Haste Slowly and The Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters (below). Books are scattered throughout both works, continuing the theme of abundant books. Isabel Nolan's titles reference, repectively, an ancient Latin expression and a print by the Spanish painter Francisco Goyaly.
"Make haste slowly" is the English translation of "Festina lente," a famous classical adage meaning that activities should be balanced with a proper blend of urgency and diligence. The phrase has a rich history going back to the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar. Titus, a later Roman emperor, minted coins with a symbol that echoed this sentiment - a dolphin wrapped around an anchor. In 1501, Aldus adopted the dolphin and anchor as his official publisher's mark (logo). For Aldus, Festina lente was the ultimate operating philosophy. It represented his commitment to printing and distributing vast amounts of pocket-sized literature rapidly (make haste) while maintaining meticulous editorial accuracy and high-quality scholarship (slowly). [4]
"The Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters" is a direct, deliberate play on Francisco Goya's 1799 satirical print, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters". By swapping "Sleep" for "Dreams," Nolan reinterprets Goya's Enlightenment-era warning. Instead of focusing purely on the terrifying absence of logic, she explores the unpredictable, sometimes monstrous outcomes that occur when human intellect and systemic frameworks over-rationalize the world. [2] [5]
While the dense tufted tapestries relate the story of Aldo Manuzio, the airy sculptures - The Central Bed (Dreamshook 2026) and The Steel Curtain (Oh!) - expand on the dream state.
Dreamshook 2026 is positioned directly on the gallery floor in the foreground, serving as the focal anchor of the room. Exploding outward from beneath the white-framed bed is a dynamic, loose constellation of hand-painted wooden diamond cutouts in shades of pink, yellow, and orange. Symbolically, the sculpture acts as a physical manifestation of a dream state breaking apart, creating an unstable floor where your waking reality feels temporarily unstable, and the fleeting fragments of your dream still linger heavily in your mind. The passing dream collides with and disrupts the actual physical world. [2]
Oh!, the delicate sculptural installation on the right side of the installation, introduces a sense of fluid movement to the installation. The looping green lines mimic a blowing window curtain - paradoxically light, flowing, and in motion, despite being completely frozen and still. The blowing curtain signifies an open window—the threshold where the private interior world meets the unpredictable outside world. This mirrors the exhibition's broader theme of the threshold between the conscious mind and the dream state. It serves as a visual metaphor for human thoughts and ideas, which are often fleeting, shifting, and hard to grasp, although we constantly try to capture, structure, and solidify them into permanent frameworks. [2]
Finally, there are the cherrywood benches on both sides of the central tapestry, Bench (for Aldo). These functional art pieces feature a distinctly angular, overlapping panel layout. Named directly after the Renaissance printer Aldo Manuzio (Aldus Manutius), they are positioned intentionally to encourage viewers to pause, slow down, and sit within the materialized dream world.
For a look at other works by Isabel Nolan visit the Kerlin Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Sources: [1] Kerlin Gallery [2] Brooklyn Rail [3] Oxford Academic [4] Big Think.com [5] Wikipedia.org, [6]Berlinartlink.
Make Haste Slowly
The Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters
Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
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