Katherine Nolan

Current project drawing on lived, subjective and closely linked experiences of witnessing birth and death. The evolving concerns of the enquiry are mortality, sickness, care, ethics, embodied experience, affect, control/lack of control, the maternal, the inter-subjective and entanglement.

First performed live as part of Care. Complicity. Critique , the opening programme of the Contemporary Irish Arts Center Los Angeles

Shifted in the domestic context due to COVID-19 restrictions, and performed as a live stream for the Golden Thread Gallery

I discuss this piece in Life on Pause: Entanglements of the Maternal and The Mortal in a Pandemic, In Performance in a Global Pandemic (2021) , edited by Laura Bissell and Lucy Wier.

Images: Allison Stewart

Solo Exhibition

MART, Dublin  2  - 31st March 2017

The Mistress of the Mantle is an exhibition of video, photography and performance works that emerged in the context of the artist’s return home. Living in the UK for 10 years, and returning to a life in Ireland, the artist was struck both by a period of personal change, unexpected culture shock and generational difference. This set of artworks act as a means to examine the process of reintegration, and taken for granted socio-cultural attitudes that surface through this renegotiation of identity and gender in an Irish context.  As the artist attempts to re-find ‘home’, the self of the past and the present confront each other in crisis.

Review: Visual Artist’s Ireland Newsheet

Interview: NEAR FM

Interview: MART

I discuss this work in Fictioning the Past: Performing the Self as the Mistress of the Mantle, a research paper delivered at the Irish Society of Theatre Research 2019 conference at Mary Immaculate College Limerick.

A specially commissioned new work, featured as part of Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol  part of ART:2016, the Arts Council's 1916 Programme.

Press: IrishTimes  and Irish Examiner 

Artists:  Danny McCarthy, Brian Connolly, Debbie Guinnane, Helena Walsh, Sandra Johnson, Fergus Byrne, Francis Fay, Katherine Nolan, Pauline Cummins, Ciara McKeon, Dominic Thorpe, Méabh Redmond, Dr. Laura McAtackney, Michelle Browne, Alastair McLennan and Sinéad O’Donnell.

Curated by Aine Philips and Niamh Murphy

This project explores the embodiment of the Irish nation as woman, in contradiction to the repression of women's full access to subject-hood in Irish society, lore and law. In both written and unwritten laws, in the language, and social and cultural codifications that continue to produce women's oppression.

Through mythical figures such as Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Ireland is depicted as woman 'violated' through colonial rule; and her sons fighting for her honour become martyred. This work represents a melodramatic, sorrowful figure of woman haunting the Gaol as site of trauma and loss. The loss is a loss of voice, a lost of subjecthood. Enacting, embodying but struggling and failing to voice her sorrow. She is dramatic and kitsch, and contains elements of both pleasure and sadness in her sorrowfulness. After many haunting visitations a climactic, dramatic and hysterical outburst rings through the Gaol. She then returns once again, to her haunting. 

The project consists of a live performance on the 21st of May 2016 at Kilmainham Gaol,  a photographic series (seen here), and video performance as part of the Silent Video Series

A series of videos seeking to find authentic experiences in melodrama.

Performing a private act of listening to music, whilst very publicly 'letting it all out' . 

I discuss these work sin Sing (book chapter) in Sound Affects: A Users Guide Edited by Sharon Mee

Live durational performance (4 hours)

The North House (formerly the male incurable ward)

Dublin Institute of Technology, Grangegorman Campus.

Part of  Personal Chemical Visceral Re:Action  for Dublin Live Art Festival

Artists: Kira O'Rielly, Niamh Murphy and Katherine Nolan

The Winter edition of the Dublin Live Art Festival invited the public to access and reimagine Grangegorman, a former mental health institution recently redeveloped to house the Dublin Institute of Technology, and the School of Creative Arts. 

This event brought together three artists whose can work can be seen as intersecting though their disparate approaches to the matter and experiences of the body. Drawing on the atmosphere and mythologies surrounding Grangegorman, these visceral explorations of the site, provided new ways to view embodied experiences. Within the charged  site the chemical, emotional, medical and biological perspectives that the performances drew attention to, took on further resonance with the institutional and personal histories that persist in the ether. In different ways, the works called attention to ideas around the ownership and materiality of the body, and fears, hopes and fantasies of transformation. The event was an intriguing way to rethink the issues provoked by the historic site through performance.

Live Performance with Eleanor Lawler

Images Series (with Amber Baruch)

Performed at 126 Gallery Galway (2015)

Livestock at the Complex, Dublin (2016)

Curb Your Carrie Bradshawism Performance Event (2013)

Live durational performance (2 hours)

Livestock: Influences : 12 Henrietta St, curated by John Conway., 2015

A performance that responded to this historic site, built in 1730 by the wealthy political elite and later occupied as tenements, a Georgian Townhouse resonant with the histories of its periods of grandeur and poverty.

 The performance was concerned with ‘holding in’ and ‘letting out’,  often thought of as bodily acts that produce repression and catharsis respectively. The work explored how emotional states and body states might influence each other: how our bodies are shaped by our emotions, and conversely how our bodies produce. our experience of emotion. This work forms part of a project and on-going concern in my practice that explored desire for catharsis, and questions around emotion and authenticity in a digital age.

Digital Video Series

Egg: 12 min 40 sec

Bannana: 9 min 21 sec

Onion: 14 Min 25 Sec

Orange: 15 min 26 sec

Borrowing from ‘youtube tutorials’ and other viewer generated content, these video works seem to take the format of instructional videos -  instead offering material-related, ‘pointless’ sensory experiences. The work refers to compulsive viewing, that like ‘peeling a scab’ might elicit visceral experiences of disgust, satisfaction or relief. Employing affect, visual pleasure and displeasure the work aims to raise questions around how and why we invest our time, emotion and attention in the digital age.

Live performance which took place on a Friday 5-6pm as workers walked home, after the week's worth of 9-5. This piece was part of Dublin Live Art Festival at the Art Lot, Dublin.

The Art lot is an outdoor exhibition space, a project that seeks to transform a derelict site at the junction of Harcourt Street and South Richmond Street.  The space is curated by John Kenny and Jonathan Carroll

Live durational performance, with Eleanor Lawler

A duo of durational performances that explored the relationship between body as flesh and body as image. Testing the boundaries between audience and performing body as an embodied and visceral response to the context of media overload that arises through the digital. 

Fish, flesh, blanket, stiletto, stocking, splashing, splatting.

The mode of performance sought to twist and test the space between the performing body and its audience through sensorial evocative performances. Performed collaboratively the two performances both diverge and interweave as they spill, smack, stink, slice, stretch, envelope and slide their way around themes of impurity and the sexualised body. The interaction of the body with everyday objects, explored through actions to the point of ‘overload’, and repetition and transition make them heavy with cultural meaning.  Pushing the objects till they slip between ‘thing’ and ‘symbol’, in turn pushing and pulling the body between a visceral presence in the world and distanced performance.

Live performance, sound and video work

This piece has existed as both a live performance, a piece to video, and a audio only  ‘anti-sight’ version.

Through focus on, and manipulation of the act of breathing this piece seeks to call attention to the experience of being in the performing body. Through fluctuations in rhythm, depth and length, I try to find the space between breathing as voluntarily controlled and involuntary act.

Drawing down the diaphragm, ribs expand outward and upward.

Air rushes in, past the lips.

Hold,

a pause,

tightness in the voice box,

stuck in the throat.

Release.

Breath pushes up and brushes along the oesophagus. Feeling full, wide, tubular. Gushing out and around the nasal passages.

Chest slowly releases.

The final,

whisper,

forced,

out.

Central to this work is a struggle with questions such as: how can the gendered body show its experiences?; how can we move beyond prescribed identifications, and towards empathy with the flesh? how can we make strange the language of being in and representing the body?

This piece continues my exploration of tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body - states of inhabiting the body, and being an image - as an on-going concern of my practice, which studies a shifting and twisting relationship to the self through the ever increasing prevalence of hyper-mediatisation.

Live performance

The Backloft, 2013. Curated by Tara O’Carroll

Digital video as performed live at Flux Factory New York (2011) as part of MART's An Invite or Reject.

Live performance at Performing Porn Symposium curated by Dr. Dani Ploeger and Sarah Taylor-Harman

Live performance at LiveStock's  Always Dangerous, at Market Studios Dublin as part of Link Culture Fest 2012

A performance that mobilises a mainstreamed image of particular kind of erotic female sexuality, and exploring, provoking and troubling desires that might be produced through this image.

Peep Hole: Uses live feed to explore the processes that produce the erotic female body as spectacle, flipping the focus from the performing body to include the camera, gallery space and spectator. An interchange between the ‘live’ and the represented is theatrically staged, seeking to produce slippage between bodies that may act and be acted upon, and those that exist as spectacular image and item of exchange in the economy of the visual. Themes of voyeurism, exhibitionism and narcissistic fascination twist and cross, as viewers become embroiled in their own act of consumption.

Series of site-responsive live performances in re-used spaces in SHUNT London, Stattbad Berlin, Space Bratislava, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin as part of MART's An Instructional European Tour (2010)

Solo Exhibition

The Link Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Epsom U.K. (2010)

Seducing the Machine is an exhibition of digital video and photographic work and marks the culmination of Nolan's doctoral research into narcissism, performance and contemporary feminist practice.Nolan’s work is radical. She uses Narcissism as a critical tool, a way of fighting back. This may seem incongruous with much contemporary art but self love is fundamental to many an artist in their work. Of course, this is doubly the case for the female practitioner as Narcissism is commonly associated with women. Nolan employs this common conception and ‘flips’ it in her work, creating an exciting push and pull, between being in control and yet perhaps being vulnerable too. The artist turns a ‘trivial’ and ‘frivolous’ fixation with her own image into a critical weapon.

Over the course of the exhibition, Nolan addresses different modalities of feminine narcissism, playing with the autoerotic, self-reflexivity, vanity, masquerade, attention seeking hysteria and exhibitionism. A complex set of exchanges between the camera/viewer/self is also explored. Nolan’s original work unravels narcissism and twists its clichéd terms.