Rose Nolan embraces invisibility and analogue rhythms to invite viewers into a slower, more present mode of art and life

11 August 2025

Nolan’s To Keep Going Breathing Helps, 2016-17, on show at the MCA. Photograph: Anna Schwartz Gallery

In the whitewashed calm of Melbourne’s “Hello House,” where a Victorian-era cottage with its front boldly spelling out “HELLO” invites strangers’ curiosity and camera lenses alike, artist Rose Nolan conducts a subtle rebellion against the hypervisible, rapid-fire existence of social media. Nolan isn’t online. She describes invisibility not as passive retreat but as “the new radical position.” In a world where presence is measured in likes and follows, she opts instead to step aside, trusting her work to resonate through texture, gesture, and an almost analog insistence on slowing down.

Her signature palette red and white, adopted since the 1990s is not about restraint but liberation. Freed from the emotional distractions of color, she says she gained head space to deepen her practice. Across more than 40 years she has moved effortlessly from colossal text installations over public hubs to intimate architectural models, self-published pamphlets, painted banners, wall works and installations. Her terrazzo‑covered floor piece All Alongside of Each Other greets travelers at Sydney’s Central Station, while Enough‑Now/Even/More‑so towers above Melbourne’s Munro Community Hub near Queen Victoria Market.

Nolan traces her beginnings to the late 1970s when, fresh from a convent school, she entered the Victorian College of the Arts and soon became a founding voice in Store 5, an artist-run collective tucked behind a cake shop that between 1989 and 1993 staged 150 exhibitions. It was an intense, heady time she remembers as “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” a moment that felt historic and irreversible.

Today her life is deeply analogue. Her home is art, but she keeps far from Instagram. Asked why she avoids social media, she says she knows herself too well to risk disappearing down a rabbit hole. Her art, and her life, exist in a parallel universe where slowness is deliberate, not nostalgic, and where labour itself becomes message.

That labour is physical. Nolan works with humble materials hessian, cardboard cutting thousands of shapes by hand until it punctures skin, even landing her in surgery. She believes that those marks of labour pass into the work itself and on to the viewer, who must intentionally pause and absorb what they are seeing and feeling. Presence becomes something earned, not bestowed.

Her new exhibition, Breathing Helps, opening at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, is less a survey than an immersion. Nolan invites viewers into a walkable landscape of her towering works, some newly commissioned, others first shown together here. Curator Victoria Lynn framed the show so that audiences might inhabit the work from different vantage points even walk above it. Dance artist Shelley Lasica will contribute live movement, adding temporal texture to the material forms.

Text and time converge in Nolan’s work. Influenced by Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, though not didactic, Nolan sources text from overheard conversations, self‑help books, art theory phrases that drift, prompting recognition rather than reaction. Her layout is an invitation to meander, giving form to the machinery of language that slows us instead of racing us. “The text and the time spent making becomes part of the latent energy within the work,” she explains, and that energy extends to the viewer. You cannot take it in all at once. You have to breathe, you have to slow.

In a culture conditioned to speed, Nolan’s exhibition is radical not in spectacle but in restraint.

When you linger, you find something that cannot be captured in pixels or logged in analytics. You discover that invisibility the refusal to be seen is itself an act of presence. You learn that making and noticing can be the same gesture, that breath can be both material and meditative.

Breathing Helps runs through November 9, 2025 at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, offering an architectural and emotional landscape where presence is both invitation and achievement. In the haze of digital noise, Nolan’s work reminds us that some of the most powerful art is made when time, touch, and quiet become the language we share.