Isabel Nolan | ‘Quiet Please’ | 2005 | DVD animation | 4mins 37secs

Since the Arts Council collection was established in the early 1960s there has been a huge growth in the number of artists using the camera to create photographs and make moving image artworks. At this time when we are all looking at an abundance of images online, we wanted to highlight some key works in the collection. There are over 100 lens-based works in the collection, and we’ve selected 14 works that are maybe not as familiar to our audiences. Works in the exhibition were created between 1987 and 2013. 

Here, Isabel Nolan, whose work is showcased under the ‘Four Decades of the Lens’ theme, tells us more about the featured artwork and what it means to have her artwork as part of the Arts Council collection. Explore this and more from the Arts Council collection at instagram.com/artscouncilireland/

Fifteen years ago Quiet, Please had its first outing at Everything I said, let me explain, my show in the Project Arts Centre. Later that summer it also featured in the Ireland at Venice, 2005 show at the Venice Biennial. These were really important exhibitions for me, so I was delighted that this work found a home; the acknowledgement and platform that a prestigious, public collection affords. 

I haven’t made an animated work in this manner in a long time but Quiet, Please still feels close to my current interests: negotiating the smallness of a life in strange world and an unfathomably vast universe, and finding an intimate, and hopefully generous way of thinking about “big” questions. It’s a while since I looked at it but I recognise instantly the humour that produced both the text and the imagery. I still mull things over in the middle of the night when questions or issues, which sometimes feel too nebulous or ill-conceived to bother with by day, take on a different kind of intensity and importance. Unfortunately it’s also a time when anxiety can find peculiar focus. Looking into the dark is often a kind of self-examination.

—Isabel Nolan

Since 1962, the Arts Council has been buying art from working artists. The Collection that evolved tells the story of modern and contemporary Irish visual art in a unique and fascinating way. Today the Collection continues to grow and its more than 1,100 paintings, sculptures and other works are on display in public spaces all over Ireland for people to experience and enjoy first hand. You can find out more at: www.artscouncil.emuseum.com