‘Breathing Helps’ is a major solo exhibition bringing together Nolan’s large-scale works with new commissions and performances.

TarraWarra Museum of Art will present Breathing Helps, a major solo exhibition by Melbourne-based artist Rose Nolan, from 9th August to 9th November 2025. Curated by museum director Dr Victoria Lynn, the show will bring together Nolan’s large-scale sculptural works for the first time, alongside new site-specific commissions and performances by artist Shelley Lasica.

Drawing on modernist legacies and the disciplines of architecture and design, Nolan’s work is characterised by a reduced palette of red and white, and the use of utilitarian materials such as hessian and painted cardboard. The exhibition positions significant works from across her career within the museum’s expansive spaces, offering what Dr Lynn describes as “a deeply contemplative and sensory space, one that encourages presence and connection.”

She continues: “Over many years, I’ve observed the deft way in which her spatial practice has evolved from her desire to extend the possibilities for painting – allowing it to unfold across time and space and to actively engage the viewer in motion.”

Highlights include To Keep Going Breathing Helps (circle work), (2016–17), comprising thousands of red and white hessian circles stitched into a monumental grid and suspended in a spiral from the ceiling. The nearly five-metre-high work embeds its title text into the structure, revealing the phrase only as visitors move around it. New commissions extend Nolan’s Immodest Gesture series of large silkscreen prints, splicing her own image with that of Jackson Pollock to challenge conventional depictions of the female artist.

“I’m thrilled to be working with curator Victoria Lynn on this major presentation of my work at TarraWarra Museum of Art, and to be working with Shelley for the first time,” Nolan says. “The exhibition’s title, Breathing Helps, speaks to the role of breath in labour and life – it’s obviously something that helps with everything.”

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Lasica’s contribution, COLLOQUY, is devised in dialogue with the exhibition. “Rather than activate or respond to the exhibition, my new work COLLOQUY telescopes in and out of the gallery spaces, offering choreographic thinking as a process to navigate through the exhibition,” she says.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published with Perimeter Books, featuring commissioned essays, a conversation between Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson, and Lasica’s COLLOQUY map. Public talks and programs will explore feminist art practice, the power of text, choreography, and the museum’s role as a site for performance and interaction.

TarraWarra Museum of Art
twma.com.au

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