My Newsletter

Fluid Flesh

‘Fluid Flesh’ showcases new work by Katherine Nolan as part of MART’s 2021 Live Art programme.

Exhibition Dates: 25th Sept – 16th October | Wed-Saturday | 1-6pm at MART HX Studios Gallery.

VENUE NOTE: While the main gallery is being refurbished this exhibition will be held at our MART HX STUDIOS GALLERY,  18A Greenmount Lane Harold’s Cross Dublin, D12 C953

FLUID FLESH

Fluid Flesh, a solo exhibition by Katherine Nolan, examines maternal experience and its intersection with mortality. Through an interplay of performance and the still and moving image the artist grapples with a viscous pink material, evoking flesh as tangible, sensual and yet ultimately beyond our grasp. Thick fluid oozes, spills and clings, re-performing the entanglement of physical and emotional attachment. Through the lens Nolan plays with the temporality of this ever-moving material, making it appear somehow both liquid and statuesque. Forms emerge and recede as if they beat into and out of life. Thus, the work mobilizes the messiness and liquid joy of maternal experience, as well as the bodies repressed precarity. 

First prompted by the artist’s experience of becoming a mother whilst losing her own mother, the work is reframed through the global pandemic, a context in which care and mortality are heightened concepts. Both maternity and the pandemic are moments of radical instability in which our interdependence comes sharply into view. Fluid Flesh seeks to materialise recognition of our precarity and entangled inter-relationality.  Thus, as well as a feminist intervention that seeks to account for and make visible an experience of motherhood through art practice, the artist proposes a view of contemporary existence itself through a Maternal Ontology.

Artist Biography: 

Katherine Nolan; an artist, lecturer and curator specialising in gender and new media. With a particular focus on tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body, her research investigates gender, identity and desire in the context of digital cultures. Recent publications include Life on Pause: Entanglements of the Maternal and The Mortal in a Global Pandemic in Performance in a Pandemic published by Routledge (2021); and Reading Queer Irish Performance across Live and Digital Practices in Interfaces Journal (2021). Working primarily in performance and lens-based media, she has exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia and regularly curates with MART, Contemporary Irish Arts Centre Los Angeles and Livestock Performance Art Platform. Recent exhibitions include The Mistress of the Mantle solo exhibition at MART Dublin (2017) and group shows at LACE Los Angeles, Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm and Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol.

Her extensive teaching experience includes a course leader role at the University of the Arts London and visiting lectureships at The National College of Art and Design, Crawford College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, London. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Digital Media in Technological University Dublin, where she has co-developed an MA in Lens-Based Media. She supervises undergraduate and postgraduate projects and her expertise includes practice-based research methodologies.  She is a co-investigator with The Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities network, and a member of the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research.

Visit: www.katherinenolan.net 

Photographic Images by Aoife Giles.