Across a four-decade career, acclaimed Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Rose Nolan has made a name for her experimentation with scale, material, and medium. Utilising painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking to playfully engage with the legacies and residues of modernism, her crystallised use of colour and powerfully graphic sensibility has formed a bridge between the codes of architecture, spatial practice, sculpture, and language.

Published alongside the major solo exhibition of the same name at TarraWarra Museum of Art, the major new book Breathing Helps highlights the recurring spatial and performative threads that play out across Nolan’s practice, alongside documentation of new site-specific commissions that respond to the museum’s architecture. Spanning installations, screenprints, photography, and text-based works, Breathing Helps offers a fresh encounter with Nolan’s radically reduced red-and-white aesthetic, and her enduring interest in material, process, and repetition. Constructed from utilitarian materials such as hessian and cardboard, her bold forms are often shaped by physical labour and seriality. Within the publication – as within the exhibition – viewers are encouraged to move in and around Nolan’s forms, encountering the work via multiple spatial perspectives, and revealing embedded texts through motion and participation.

Co-published by Perimeter Editions and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Breathing Helps features new texts by Dr Victoria Lynn, Sue Cramer, Amelia Winata, and Lisa Radford, and a conversation between Rose Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson. The publication also includes images from Nolan’s ongoing Me Working series, which features everyday process documentation from the studio, and a performance map from artist and choreographer Shelley Lasica, who – in an interdisciplinary gesture – was invited by Nolan to present a series of choreographic performances, titled COLLOQUY, that navigate the spaces and ideas of the exhibition.