Irish artist Nuala Goodman's exhibition 'Gardens'at this year's Architecture Biennale in Venice is bright and colourful with a touch of magic – as was her journey to get there, writes BERNICE HARRISON

EVERY EXHIBITION has a backstory but how Milan-based Irish artist Nuala Goodman ended up with a major exhibition in Venice during this year’s Architecture Biennale is more serendipitous than most.

Her well-received 2008 exhibition Portraits from Milanfeatured some of the key players in European design, including Ettore Sotsass, Alesandro Mendini, Alberto Alessi and Paul Smith – mostly people she'd worked with during the time she's been living in Italy. They were adventurous, interpretive pieces. She experimented with a velvet flocking technique that she has been developing for some time, and which gives a luscious three-dimensional tactile quality to a painting.

Goodman thought the Fortuny Museum in Venice might be interested in the Portraits exhibition because of its unique remit. The gallery belongs to the Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia (the Foundation of Civic Museums in Venice), a group of the 13 most prestigious museums in Venice. The Fortuny Museum was once the home and atelier of Mariano Fortuny, painter, sculptor and furniture designer but perhaps most famous for his fabric designs. The three-storey palazzo now houses a permanent exhibition of his work plus a space for temporary exhibitions that complement his mixed-media creativity.

Late last year, as Goodman was preparing for a meeting to discuss her portraits with director of the Fortuny Museum Daniela Ferretti, she threw into her bag pieces of fabrics she had been working on, again experiments with the velvet flocking technique.

Ferretti was interested in the portraits but she fell on the fabrics and encouraged Goodman to develop an exhibition around them that also incorporated her portraits and other elements of her work. Back home in Milan, Ferretti introduced her to Moroso – the Italian furniture company known for working with avant-garde designers such as Ron Arad and Tom Dixon – who were interested in being part of an exhibition for the Biennale.

“The fabrics I first showed were voiles, very dreamy and light,” says Goodman “but when Moroso came on board I was able use rough linen, like an artist’s canvas, and then have these really contemporary shaped pieces of furniture covered in it.”

Working on the theme of gardens, her exhibition currently on view is made up of 11 installations, much like dreamy theatre sets with furniture covered in delicate floral designs and hand-finished by Goodman with velvet flocking, carpets she designed and some of the 2008 portraits. The installations create a path through the museum and out into the walled garden of the palazzo. “It’s a very magical space,” she says of the Fortuny Museum, “I wanted to create a visual and tactile exhibition, something that invites visitors to get involved, to sit down on the pieces, to touch the work.”

As it turns out, she tapped into one of the central themes of this year’s Architecture Biennale, which is all about the people who make the buildings and how those buildings are lived in. Ferretti requested a retrospective element to the exhibition and Goodman – who has always blurred the lines between art and design – was able to include some of the limited edition hand-painted wooden boxes she made for Alessi in the 1990s, a watch she designed for Swatch and a wardrobe filled with her painted clothes and shoes from the 1980s.

To gather these up, she came back home to Dublin to borrow the dresses and clothes that Eve Linders, owner of vintage shop Jenny Vander, had bought from her in the 1980s when she was still a student at NCAD. Her long-time friend film director Neil Jordan wrote the forward to the catalogue for Gardens, mentioning a strange coincidence he had when making the film The Miracle. His costume designer travelled to Italy looking for clothes and came back with a beautiful silk shirt which appeared to be hand-painted with a series of surreal images. “It was worn by the leading man in one of the defining scenes in the movie. When my wife Brenda saw this scene, she exclaimed: ‘That’s Nuala’s shirt!’” It turned out that Goodman had sold a painting as a fabric design to a print company on Lake Como who had in turn sold the fabric to a fashion designer who made it into a series of shirts which were on sale in an exclusive boutique in Florence. More serendipity.

Gardensby Nuala Goodman, runs at the Palazzo Fortuny Museum: Campo San Beneto (San Marco), until January 9