'“I’m So Important is a study in and reckoning with the arrested development Nola observes in both herself and her peers, examining the impacts of a heightened awareness of self and overconsumption of everything. Ambition manifests itself as thought rather than action, inspiration turns into boredom and the focus shifts to what could be rather than what is.

The subject in Nola’s paintings floats paralysed in her bedroom, moored by affirmations and an imagined world where she isn’t simply just there. In the 2010s, a radical positivity movement commandeered media and encouraged young women to speak their own unique success into existence. Paired with the internet and an access to anything at all, a sense of overstimulation rather than motivation overwhelms Nola’s subject. Plushie toys act as symbols for both the superficial and the spiritual, holding sentimental memory in their fluffy exterior but detachment in their eyes. The paintings are not unsympathetic to their subject however, romanticizing the mundanity, irony and indulgence of her stillness. 

In Nola’s work, daily tasks become too impossibly boring to start and the act of procrastination is elevated to a spiritual ritual. Where we once understood with certainty the difference between the profane and religious or mundane and divine, in Nola’s series, desire and action are conflated and the subject is the victim, saviour and persecutor.”