Aleana Egan & Isabel Nolan – Material Flux

Alena Egan & Isabel Nolan
Material Flux
29 June – 10 August
Lower Gallery

“It is precisely for feeling that one needs time and not thought. Thought is a flash of lightning, feeling is a ray from the most distant of stars.”
Marina Tsvetaeva, quoted in Some Answers Without Questions, Lavinia Greenlaw.

Aleana Egan and Isabel Nolan’s exhibition leans into the special character of Highlanes Gallery. Both artists share an interest in using a broad array of media to create atmospheric, restless exhibitions often with roots in literary writing. This show will nudge, play with and exploit the ways in which religious architecture mediates our encounters with matter and meaning. Broadly speaking, the works in the exhibition have come together over the last year. Yet the seeds of the show can be traced back over years, to conversations, tentative suggestions and unconscious probes.

Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious artefacts, Greek sculptures and historical figures. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by wide-ranging research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects; large, richly coloured tapestries, to improvised drawings made using watercolour or colouring pencils. In concert, they feel equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection as well as its startling achievements in art and thought. Driven by “the calamity, the weirdness, horror, brevity and wonder of existing alongside billions of other preoccupied humans”, her works give generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the chaos of the world is made beautiful or given meaning through human activity.

Working primarily with sculpture, and occasionally with painting and film, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained, but are laden with subtle references to the lived environment. An airy, slender metal structure might echo an architectural form plucked out of the landscape, while her use of simple household materials – plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics – speak to the domestic. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her film and painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability.