Rose Nolan
Breath­ing Helps

‘Breath­ing Help­s’
9 August — 9 Novem­ber 2025
Tar­raWar­ra Muse­um of Art
Vic­to­ria

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, screen print­ing, 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.