Visual artist Rose Nolan | The Saturday Paper

Rose Nolan is an artist who transforms the materials of everyday life into works of often striking scale and quiet resonance. Her major solo exhibition Breathing Helps, which opens next month at TarraWarra Museum of Art, reveals her gift for animating space with bold, language-based wall paintings, sculptural screens and hanging textile installations. Drawing together the many threads of her work, the exhibition traces Nolan’s deep engagement with how meaning is made and felt in a world dense with signs, systems and social norms: a world we move through but rarely pause to read.

Nolan is part of a generation of Melbourne artists who came to prominence in the mid 1980s, exploring abstraction through a dual engagement with early 20th century vanguard art and late modernism. Her early works, rough cardboard assemblages, responded to Russian constructivism’s emphasis on materiality and spatial dynamics. Later, the influence of minimalism introduced a focus on objecthood, repetition and the viewer’s embodied experience. Threaded through these evolving concerns was conceptualism’s investigation of the discursive and institutional frameworks that shape how art is understood.

Nolan’s work shares affinities with conceptualism in its use of language as a primary medium to foreground ideas. Her series Big Words (Not Mine) borrows text from canonical art theory, including statements by Vito Acconci, Rosalind Krauss and Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), while deliberately omitting the word “art”. What attracted her to LeWitt’s text, she says, was “seeing an image of his handwritten notes, which revealed the intimacy of him thinking through things”. An interest in how thoughts and feelings intertwine guides her use of text. Whether filtering intellectual claims or noting the wording of a sign or snippets of conversation, Nolan is as compelled by the rhythm and tone of language as its conceptual weight.

This emphasis on the felt and immediate reflects Nolan’s abiding interest in how meaning is shaped through lived experience. While her work engages with the social structures that influence how art is produced and received, it moves beyond conceptualism’s preoccupation with institutional critique. She turns her attention to the everyday, to casual speech, packaging and signage as sites of encounter and resistance, reframing the overlooked as spaces where value, authorship and understanding are constantly negotiated.

From the mid 1990s, Nolan began turning the camera on herself, using a simple Instamatic to document moments in the studio – not just the finished work but the act of working itself. In her current exhibition, the large screenprints Immodest Gesture #3 and Immodest Gesture #4 (2025) splice images of Nolan at work with Hans Namuth’s iconic photographs of Jackson Pollock creating his signature drip painting. Side by side, Nolan and Pollock appear to work in unison, collapsing time and authorship in a playful, irreverent gesture. Nolan delights in “the idea of Rose and grumpy Jackson in the studio, working together”.

There is a more serious aspect to Namuth’s photographs, which helped solidify a gendered ideal of creativity framed as a masculine, expressive force driven by inner turmoil. The idea of the anguished male genius became a dominant model of artistic identity in the 1950s, from which women artists were largely excluded. Figures such as Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife and a key force in shaping his career and legacy, and Joan Mitchell, who worked in related styles, were often marginalised or misread.

Women’s work has long been mythologised as instinctive, tied to care or domesticity rather than skill or intellect. In art, this has devalued practices associated with women like craft, textiles and collaboration, seeing them largely dismissed as decorative or amateur beside the perceived seriousness of individual, typically male, expression.

Nolan became aware of the challenges faced by women artists at art school but was fortunate to find strong mentors who broadened her view of art practice. She recalls how Elizabeth Gower introduced her to the work of Eva Hessa and John Nixon; Jenny Watson to Kazimir Malevich; and Lesley Dumbrell to Helen Frankenthaler. Through her art history lecturer Janine Burke, she entered the orbit of the George Paton Gallery and its community of artists, writers and curators.

As Nolan explains, at a time when figurative expressionism was in the ascent, “I was a very young person from a convent school thrust into the VCA [Victorian College of the Arts] and had a lot of catching up to do.” She says she discovered “an intellectually exciting, radical way of working that made it feel like many things were possible”.

The fusion of formal invention and radical disruption that defined early 20th century avant-garde art and which found renewed expression in the materially grounded practices of 1980s Melbourne abstraction is a legacy that continues to inhabit Nolan’s work.

Immodest Gesture #3 and #4 underscore the way Nolan has critically engaged with the meaning of materials, modes of production and subject matter in art, while retaining a commitment to studio-based practice. Against the emphasis on artistic and personal struggle in abstract expressionism, Nolan’s work emphasises process-based effort over time that redirects attention to the often invisible labour in art production. Nolan creates large-scale works with handpainted textile components, signature red-and-white palette and self-deprecating texts that contribute an irregularity and humanness counter to the detached industrial aesthetic of minimalism.

The politics of manual labour involve questions of power, value and visibility: who performs physical work, how it is compensated and how it is culturally understood. For Nolan, “thinking and making go hand in hand, the time involved in the physical making giving that space for thinking”.

She explores these concerns through the intertwined lenses of art and design. Aspects of her practice highlight how design shapes the material world and mediates relationships, affecting not only aesthetics and function but also cultural and economic value. She mobilises familiar forms and visual codes to complicate these dynamics. In her Flat Flower Work (2004–2025), stylised geometric motifs are painted in red and white on cardboard boxes and found packaging, evoking mass-produced graphics and visual merchandising.

Nolan’s interest in the functional but easily overlooked continues in Breathing Helps, through a group of recent works titled Rise and Go (platform for low relief) (2025). Made from high-density cardboard and polyurethane tactile indicators, they extend her inquiry into how public space is structured and navigated. Originally developed to assist vision-impaired pedestrians, tactile indicators have become tools for all distracted city-dwellers. Relocated to the gallery, they transform from a ubiquitous detail of urban infrastructure into conceptual prompts, inviting reflection on movement, transition and access.

In two recent public commissions, Nolan treats language as an active force embedded in the built environment. Her words appear overhead or underfoot, engaging commuters as participants and disrupting routine with moments of reflection on connection and solitude in public life. All Alongside of Each Other (2023) stretches across the concourse at Sydney’s Central Station in red-and-white terrazzo, taking the form of a running track. Calming, if satirical, phrases such as “SIMPLY BREATHE NATURALLY” and “STAY FOCUSED WHEN EVERYTHING MOVES AROUND YOU” offer a gentle provocation amid the rush of daily commuters.

Her use of text extends the legacy of conceptual art in treating language as both material and message, but it diverges significantly in tone, form and intent. While early conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner used language to contest the commodification of art, Nolan grounds her text works in material processes and the visual vernacular of signage. The handmade, often informal quality of her banners, bunting and early floor pieces tempers the intellectual austerity of conceptualism through their craft-based construction.

Nolan’s text-based practice aligns more closely with artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, who also deploy language to interrogate how meaning is shaped and circulated. Like Kruger, Nolan sometimes uses bold, declarative typographic statements, yet her tone is typically open-ended and suggestive rather than confrontational. Like Holzer, Nolan introduces aphoristic phrases into architectural and public spaces, but where Holzer’s LED texts, posters and engraved benches convey a stream of urgent, often authoritative messages, Nolan’s texts typically require attentive looking and physical movement before they reveal their meaning.

Nolan’s work consistently explores the instability of meaning and the relationship between form and personal and cultural reference, shifting between large-scale and intimate expressions. Her early cardboard constructions referenced her Catholic upbringing and interest in Australian Rules football. More recently, her Working Models series invents typologies of vanguard architecture using packaging and ephemera that document her personal consumption.

Materials in Nolan’s practice are never neutral. While the art world traditionally privileges media such as oil painting as markers of seriousness, craft-based materials such as hessian, common in her work, are often seen as secondary. She challenges these hierarchies, using humble materials to question what counts as legitimate artistic labour. This philosophy of accessibility over exclusivity is evident in Big Words (Not Mine) – Transcend the poverty of partial vision (floor version) (2021), a hemispherical carpet mirrored to create a circular work that captures the viewer’s presence. The piece foregrounds perception, participation and embodied experience.

Nolan’s use of modest, everyday materials and modular construction also speaks to the realities of sustaining a long-term art practice. For many artists, creative ambition must be balanced with limited access to resources, time and space. Nolan’s work embraces these constraints not as limitations but as generative conditions. Her practice affirms adaptability and persistence – they propose that art is not a rarefied product but an ongoing, embodied activity deeply entangled with the social and material conditions of its making.

Breathing Helps promises to be a compelling demonstration that art can be both rigorous and reflective while remaining adaptable, modest and deeply connected to everyday life. The inclusion of COLLOQUY, a new series of performances by Shelley Lasica, expands the exhibition’s spatial and temporal dimensions. Yet, as Nolan explains, it resists “the institutional trend of having a dancer or musician respond to the work in an exhibition”. Lasica’s practice centres on embodied performance, exploring gesture, presence and the subtleties of physical experience. Though movement-based, she identifies as an artist, emphasising that her performances are not driven by technique or choreography but by the creation of spatial and sensory encounters.

In conversation, Nolan underscores the autonomy of each artist’s practice, describing the exhibition as a space of coexistence grounded in mutual regard. “Two artists are working around each other,” she says, “exploring the space they are inhabiting in a nuanced way with a lightness of touch.” Lasica’s work introduces another register of embodied inquiry into Breathing Helps, her attention to physical experience and the politics of the body echoing Nolan’s emphasis on materiality and process as lived, tactile and situated. The result is a layered environment in which distinct artistic voices inhabit a shared space, reinforcing the openness, multiplicity and responsiveness to meaning that define Nolan’s practice.