Rose Nolan
Work­ing Models

Work­ing Mod­els
by Ingrid Per­iz

In the archi­tec­tur­al design process work­ing mod­els are used to check the pro­por­tion, vol­ume and shape of works whose final form is still being deter­mined. At once rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al and pro­vi­sion­al, work­ing mod­els are also tools for they enable a fur­ther think­ing through or refine­ment of a drawn-up struc­ture. Rose Nolan’s work­ing mod­els bor­row their name­sakes’ sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty but are ful­ly inde­pen­dent enti­ties whose titles come only after they are com­plet­ed. No plan or draw­ing brings them forth, instead their start­ing point is the poten­tial Nolan sees in found pack­ag­ing, the too-read­i­ly dis­card­ed mir­a­cles of fold­ed card­board and mould­ed plas­tics along with the uncon­scious humour of any brand’s print­ed ver­bal address.

Nolan fus­es a long­stand­ing inter­est in archi­tec­ture with a play­ful, hands-on inven­tive­ness in these trans­for­ma­tions. As box­es are stuck togeth­er and refash­ioned, striped waxed straws become cov­ered walk­ways link­ing card­board silos, a stack of tea pack­ets grows into a tow­er, and a blis­ter pack reveals itself as ser­ried sky­lights. Nolan treats her found mate­r­i­al here as ready-mades, just as she has long done with over­heard phras­es or found text in oth­er areas of her prac­tice like Word Work. Com­bin­ing addi­tion and exci­sion, the Work­ing Mod­els nod to col­lage and assem­blage but Nolan’s pro­ce­dure is arguably her own. Their mate­ri­als — famil­iar, often hum­ble stuff oth­er­wise des­tined for the bin– work against any sense of archi­tec­tur­al author­i­ty, just as this domes­tic famil­iar­i­ty deflates any pos­si­ble mon­u­men­tal­i­ty.

The ear­li­est iter­a­tions of the Work­ing Mod­els were large­ly all white, acknowl­edg­ing the canon­i­cal pre­cept that linked the iden­ti­ty of mod­ernist archi­tec­ture to the white­ness of its sur­faces, as archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Mark Wigley has put it. High­light­ed by care­ful use of black and the tini­est hints of colour, Nolan’s Work­ing Mod­els’ white was rarely Ripolin pure white, mod­ernist architecture’s paint of choice. Vari­a­tions in white card­board, the stripes of revealed bar­codes, shad­ed aper­tures, and paint­ed, whit­ed-out labels gave vari­ety to an essen­tial­ly mono­chro­mat­ic palette. Colour announces itself in the more recent Work­ing Mod­els. Adobe House rhymes cardboard’s woody brown with the look of dried mud, CHAPEL sings resplen­dent in red and pink, while oth­er works are ground­ed on coloured bases. Many of these colours are new in Rose Nolan’s palette — the warm flesh of wood­en cheese con­tain­ers, cos­met­ic box coral, Adi­das blue — and hav­ing been found, and retained, they become in the Work­ing Mod­els Rose Nolan’s own. Just as any build­ing is a ​“por­trait” of its design­er, the Work­ing Mod­els, ​“por­traits” of nev­er-to-be-built build­ings, are por­traits too of Rose Nolan, artist and con­sumer.

Like colour, found text comes into its own too, occa­sion­al­ly in glo­ri­ous silli­ness — FUN INFUSER; seri­ous­ly, Durable; sus­tain­able, sim­ple, styl­ish. An inter­est in address — who’s say­ing what to whom — is a recur­ring fea­ture of Nolan’s prac­tice, as is the artist’s reg­u­lar cat­e­go­riza­tion of vari­eties of work. The ear­li­est Work­ing Mod­els were shown as Home­work in 2005; they can also be seen as lit­tle ver­sions of her pho­to­graph­ic series Big Still Lives, where mod­ernist build­ings were seen in scaled-up sculp­tur­al terms, and equal­ly, giv­en their occa­sion­al hints of label, warn­ing and instruc­tion, as tiny incar­na­tions of Word Work.

Rose Nolan does not yet have an Art Work cat­e­go­ry but there’s no end of art in the Work­ing Mod­els. Shape-shift­ing Picas­so lurks in CHAPEL, at once avian and rep­til­ian and sport­ing a bumpy spine of women’s faces, while a num­ber of Work­ing Mod­els give three-dimen­sion­al form to the expand­ed pla­nari­ty of ana­lyt­i­cal Cubism. Fold marks retained on two-dimen­sion­al card­board sur­faces sug­gest the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spa­tial­i­ty. House of the Year, a square box frac­tured through the addi­tion of oth­er box­es, framed aper­tures and cut ver­tices, is a lit­tle Cubist cube plead­ing ​“unbox me” on blue. In Sig­na­ture Style the wrap-around text works like a print­ed pat­tern, a bit of papi­er col­lé which, at some angles, dis­turbs any sense of three-dimen­sion­al­i­ty. And New Age / Care Facil­i­ty recy­cles one of syn­thet­ic Cubism’s prin­ci­pal motifs — the wine bot­tle — here a real half-bot­tle plas­tic sleeve — mak­ing a work that gives the look of typ­i­cal­ly flat late Cubism a three-dimen­sion­al form. Oth­er Work­ing Mod­els quote art direct­ly, incor­po­rat­ingthe soft mauve min­i­mal­ism of Robert Jacks, Stephen Bram’s frac­tured pat­terns and Alvar Aalto’s encir­cling greens — images of art works and paper col­lé, treat­ed as ele­ments of the real.

The box­es used here have held, among oth­er things, laun­dry deter­gent, veg­an dough­nuts, hot cof­fee (and cof­fee cups), Chanel, Marimekko, Apple prod­ucts, work boots, run­ning shoes, and wine, both fan­cy French and cheap, a gamut of sta­ples, con­sumer durables and lux­u­ries. Rose Nolan tells me that some­times she likes the box more than what’s in it, ful­ly aware that pack­ag­ing is as much ad as brand­ing. Her trans­for­ma­tions might well sus­pend that mys­te­ri­ous appeal Marx called com­mod­i­ty fetishism by sub­vert­ing the box­es’ pur­pose and address; the appeal of the Work­ing Mod­els is how­ev­er all their own.