Body Meets Mind at Breathing Helps, Rose Nolan’s New Show at TarraWarra

An hour’s drive from Melbourne, on a grassy rise in the Yarra Valley, the TarraWarra Museum of Art is hosting a survey of one of Australia’s most enduring yet understated artists: Rose Nolan. Breathing Helps spotlights her decades-long engagement with language, scale and the body, featuring key works from her archive as well as new site-specific commissions.

A consistent presence in both Australian and international art since the ’80s, Nolan works across installation, sculpture, photography, painting and printing. Though a minimalist palette of red and white has become her signature, the exhibition shows the breadth of her practice: its scale, its physicality, and its nods to architecture and design.

Entering the first gallery, visitors are greeted by Big Words (Not Mine) , a suspended installation of red-and-white bunting paired with a semi-circular carpet on the floor, with the same title. The works’ fragmented text can only be read by walking around them. “Not only do they embody my presence, but also the potential presence of the audience as they navigate the work,” Nolan tells Broadsheet.

Across the museum’s galleries, large-scale sculptural forms are brought together for the first time, under the curation of TarraWarra director Dr Victoria Lynn. The exhibition also features COLLOQUY , a performance suite choreographed by artist Shelley Lasica, performed live three times by three dancers across the duration of Breathing Helps.

The show has also allowed Nolan to reflect on her own archive, reformatting past works to explore ideas of repetition and return. Her practice, which often favours lightweight sculptural materials, gestures to feminist traditions – though without strong political intent. “It’s not explicit in a political sense,” Nolan explains. “I think it’s implicit, in the way the works are made, how they’re presented and how they address the audience.”

This is just one aspect of an exhibition that underscores the physicality and poetry of Nolan’s work. To apprehend these pieces fully takes time, movement and attention – things that, as the title suggests, remind us that breathing helps.

Breathing Helps is on display until November 9, 2025, at TaraWarra Museum of Art. The final performance of COLLOQUY will be held from 1pm to 2pm on Sunday November 9. This event is ticketed.