Rose Nolan: Breathing Helps

TarraWarra Museum of Art presents Breathing Helps, a major solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian artist Rose Nolan. Bringing together large-scale sculptural forms for the first time, the exhibition highlights recurring spatial and performative threads in Nolan’s practice alongside new site-specific commissions that respond to the Museum’s architecture.

Spanning installations, printed matter, photography and text-based works, Breathing Helps offers a fresh encounter with Nolan’s radically reduced red-and-white aesthetic, and her enduring interest in material, process and repetition. Constructed from utilitarian materials such as hessian and cardboard, her bold forms are often shaped by physical labour and seriality.

A highlight of the exhibition is To Keep Going Breathing Helps (circle work) (2016–17), a monumental spiral of stitched hessian circles suspended from the ceiling. Viewers are invited to move through and around the structure, revealing the embedded text of the title through their own motion.

Breathing Helps also debuts new works from Nolan’s ongoing Immodest Gesture series, in which she splices self-portraits with archival images of male artists in the studio, challenging traditional representations of artistic authorship.

In an interdisciplinary gesture, Nolan has invited artist and choreographer Shelley Lasica to present a new series of performances titled COLLOQUY. Rather than responding to the exhibition, COLLOQUY offers choreographic thinking as a way to navigate the spaces and ideas of Breathing Helps, supported by a specially designed performance map.

A major exhibition catalogue co-published with Perimeter Books will accompany the show, featuring new texts by Dr Victoria Lynn, Sue Cramer, Amelia Winata, and Lisa Radford, as well as a conversation between Rose Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson.