Human, all too Human (an Art exhibition) Studio G11 Bunclody

INSTALLATION 

Curated by Nelly Shylova 

Stephen Nolan paints to record and organise the thoughts, images and imagined conversations that occupy his inner life. Something is given form, something else remains beyond reach. 

The installation unfolds as a journey from the external world towards the intimate. Landscapes gradually give way to bodies, desire, tenderness and the pain of closeness. The viewer moves from bird’s-eye views of the town, through streets and landscapes, to Nolan’s living room. 

The paintings seem to resist an orderly account. They cover the walls, lean against one another and accumulate on the floor. Some are immediately visible, others are obscured. Works by other artists from Nolan’s personal collection enter the arrangement, complicating the distinction between what he has made, what he has kept and what shapes his personal environment. 

Furniture and personal objects bring us closer to the space in which Nolan lives and works. But even here, seemingly as close to the source as we can get, something remains inaccessible. 

No arrangement is final, the work is always in progress. What we encounter is a moment in an ongoing process – the material traces of a life spent looking, making and trying to give form to what cannot entirely be expressed. 

It is a hopeless task. And it is all too human.