Rose Nolan
WORD WORK

Look at Rose Nolan’s Big Words (Not Mine) — LOOK­ING AND SEE­ING AT THE SAME TIME, 2025 and Big Words (Not Mine) — SEE­ING EYE TO EYE WITH­OUT LOOK­ING AT EACH OTH­ER, 2025 and note how on the roller coast­er ride of red and white typog­ra­phy those dou­bled E’s become win­dows while TO and AT offer prepo­si­tion­al space and visu­al pause. And, when doing this, think about the extent to which it’s pos­si­ble to tease apart your own process­es of look­ing and see­ing, a task made more com­plex by the fact that any view­er might want to hold read­ing — and with it, seman­tics — in abeyance in order to do this, at least once the work has indeed been read.

All this might sound impos­si­ble, but it hap­pens in less time than it takes to read the pre­ced­ing paragraph.

Those Big Words (Not Hers) belong to Ian Burn, whose 1990 essay ​“Glimpses: On periph­er­al vision,” dis­cuss­es the slip­page between read­ing and see­ing that occurs in art­works using the imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able forms of let­ters and numer­als. (For Burn, ​“see­ing” always implied more than the con­tents of vision; it includ­ed the con­text in which those con­tents make sense.) Rose Nolan has engaged repeat­ed­ly with this kind of slip­page through­out her prac­tice. In this exhi­bi­tion its largest iter­a­tion, almost 27 metres long, is Big Words — WRONG WAY GO BACK (reversed ver­sion), 2025 a site-spe­cif­ic wall work run­ning the length of the Anna Schwartz Gallery space. Here reversed white let­ters fre­quent­ly abut each oth­er, meld­ing into unfa­mil­iar out­lines; red neg­a­tive spaces assume strange forms whose height — some 3 metres — invite a bod­i­ly rela­tion in addi­tion to demand­ing a pure­ly opti­cal auto-cor­rec­tion on the part of any prospec­tive read­er who must reverse famil­iar read­ing pro­to­col and pro­ceed from right to left while walk­ing the length of the work. They must go back, the wrong way.

Many of Rose Nolan’s Word Works fea­ture a sim­i­lar cir­cu­lar­i­ty, or self-descrip­tion. The large-scale All Along­side of Each Oth­er, 2023 at Sydney’s Cen­tral Sta­tion announces to view­ers their expe­ri­ence as com­muters. On a dif­fer­ent scale in this exhi­bi­tion, the sharply trun­cat­ed form of A Big Word — ENOUGH, 2025 shows that despite its angled brevi­ty it is indeed suf­fi­cient to be a work and to be read. Big Words — OVER THINK­ING, 2025 sim­ply affix­es OVER on top of THINK­ING, an instance of proud self-descrip­tion with room to spare for prepo­si­tion­al ambi­gu­i­ty. OVER may be exces­sive, because too much or sim­ply past because think­ing is fin­ished with, and done.

Rose Nolan is not done with think­ing about the mak­ing of her work which she orga­nizes — con­cep­tu­al­ly, for­mal­ly, and prac­ti­cal­ly — into a range of cat­e­gories that are porous rather than fixed. The three-dimen­sion­al Big Word works in this exhi­bi­tion meld the cat­e­gories of Word Work and Con­struct­ed Work. (Exam­ples of the lat­ter, the archi­tec­tural­ly-inflect­ed Work­ing Mod­els, were shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2023). Like the work­ing mod­els, these new word con­struc­tions are formed out of repur­posed found card­board pack­ag­ing, and have vol­ume, pro­jec­tion, and depth. Their con­struct­ed nature is not hid­den. The open upper and low­er edges of Big Words (Not Mine) — LOOK­ING AND SEE­ING AT THE SAME TIME, 2025 show glued Twin­ings tea box­es giv­ing struc­tur­al sup­port, and a vis­i­ble aper­ture hints at unknown pur­pose in the box that holds THINK­ING — all of which, along with the wrap around nature of Big Words — ALMOST OVER BUT NOT QUITE, 2025 — com­pli­cates their leg­i­bil­i­ty. The word con­struc­tions are not mere sur­faces bear­ing text and view­ing them can’t be reduced to read­ing, although read them we will while we look.

Ingrid Per­iz, 2025