SARAH NOLAN

Ever wondered what it takes to become a successful artist? Following on from her last show at Harrison Galleries, a series of hand-sewn homages to her favourite artists, Sarah Nolan questions this in her latest show Damien and me. Taking inspiration from the artist, Damien Hirst, Nolan humourously dissects and learns from his savvy art making/marketing approach by appropriating one of his most famous templates, the dot paintings. Across her hand sewn fabric dots, slogans like 'Produce', 'Brand', 'Pose' and 'Candy' punctuate spaces, reminding us all of what artists must do in order to establish themselves in the market.

Hirst may have three factories employing over one hundred assistants to create multiples of work that he doesn’t touch, but Nolan with her limited resources, has pushed her fingers to the extreme. The results are thirty heavily constructed pieces that possess an incredibly rich, vibrant materiality. Compared to Hirst’s mechanical approach, Nolan is ‘hands on’ and obsessive as she single handedly takes on his quote “There’s nothing wrong with visual art being f***king eye candy”. She plays and experiments with her thread creating a depth of layers and surfaces in a way Hirst’s paintings cannot. The elegant clash of plain, printed and exotic fabrics unite to reveal subtle but equally bold works. These fabrics, sourced from her grandmother’s and mother’s tea towel collections, discarded head scarves, curtains and remnants from fabric shops along London’s Goldhawk Road, are enlivened by Nolan’s stitched line work that skips and gathers across the dots imparting a painterly quality. Delicate silhouettes, of the artists Gilbert and George, also break the repetition of dots in the fifteen smaller pieces building on and reminding us of previous tributes.

As the title suggests Nolan owes a lot to Hirst, but one can equally say she doesn’t. By sewing up the king of contemporary with needle and thread she is on her way to producing a new vocabulary.

Samantha Sinnayah
June 2008