If there’s a consistent thematic in my work it’s about how meaning is made, artist Isabel Nolan tells Brian McAvera
Brian McAvera: Isabel, you were born in Dublin in 1974, during a decade that saw the beginnings of a major resurgence in Irish art and also saw female artists coming strongly to the fore. Who were your parents, were you or your family interested in art when you were growing up, and how far was your childhood formative for your later art? Isabel Nolan: Neither of my parents was able to continue their schooling beyond primary, but they were and are keen autodidacts and the house is full of books. My mam is very interested in art and is herself a Sunday painter. There were plenty of books on art, masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay or the Louvre, for example. Apparently when we were very young and bored she’d give them to us to look through. I went through a great phase of copying paintings, probably when I was about ten or eleven. And she took us to museums and exhibitions. I have three elder siblings. We were all encouraged to draw and paint and we were also always encouraged to read. Fiction, for me, from an early age, was an important way of understanding the world and other people and simultaneously escaping from reality.
Peter Somerville-Large recounts the history of the National Museum of Ireland’s significant ethnographic collection, last displayed over thirty years ago
Eileen Black recounts the life and work of Post-Impressionist painter, Georgina Moutray Kyle
