Rose Nolan: Working Models
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Melbourne | AustraliaIn 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.
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.