Contemporary Australia: Women

113 Spanning almost three decades, Rose Nolan’s artistic project is divided into several idioms: Banners, Constructed Work, Flat Work, Homework and Word Work, denoting the materials she uses and methods of construction. Most writers have focused on influences from the early twentieth‑century Russian avant-garde, the legacy of abstract painting, and the use of text and photography on Nolan’s work. However, it is also possible to pinpoint a different thread of enquiry running through Nolan’s works: the role of women’s practice. Nolan’s oeuvre does not declare a relationship to feminism, and her works often make a point of deflating any political or dogmatic affirmations, but such a reading can shed further light on her works, and provoke new considerations of her influences. Nolan has long acknowledged Russian Suprematist and Constructivist influences on her oeuvre. Not only are the legacies of Kasmir Malevich and Alexandr Rodchenko present, but also those of the great women artists of the period: Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova, themselves the outcome of Constructivism’s rejection of gendered artistic hierarchies and its emphasis on working with the domestic aspects of everyday life, a traditionally feminised domain. 1 Nolan even made and sometimes wore her own prozodezhda (Russian revolutionary production clothing) in the early 1980s, as Stepanova had implored the Constructivists to do. 2 While Nolan has described her relationship to the early Russian avant-garde as a kind of ‘schoolgirl crush’ 3 , she does not reiterate their utopian agitprop proclamations of the socialist project, but rather turns their forms to more personal, often questioning, textual narratives. Ingrid Periz has noted that Nolan’s engagement with the legacy of revolutionary forms is marked by inversions and reversals, foregoing their heroics for the somewhat smaller Help Me To Do Things Differently . 4 Periz also maintains that Nolan’s large‑scale works often display a tension between grandeur and its opposite, perhaps intended, failure. 5 The texts incorporated into Nolan’s large constructions thus often have succinct yet double meanings, and their ambiguous effects have led them to be considered in terms of institutional critique. While this criticality could perhaps be seen as a feminist gesture, Nolan’s resolutely deadpan mode is a wry, street-smart derailing of accepted modes of authority. Chris McAuliffe has observed that Nolan’s work maintains an ambiguity between doubt and faith, homage and parody, belief and blasphemy, truth and travesty — essentially, that it has an uncertain relationship with Modernism and the claims it made for art. 6 Nolan’s work shows that, in repetition, maxims become ridiculous, perhaps even meaningless, as seen in the recurring, ‘OVER AND OVER, AGAIN AND AGAIN’. In the late 1980s and early 90s, Nolan was associated with Melbourne’s Store 5, a group of artists working in non-objective styles to examine the legacies of abstraction and modernism. Unlike most painting movements throughout Australian art history, Store 5 included a strong group of women artists, including Kerrie Poliness, Melinda Harper and, later, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Anne-Marie May and Kathy Temin, some working more explicitly within feminist frameworks than others. In a discussion about women artists during this period, art historian Catriona Moore suggested that ‘Modernism was thus a recurrent field of feminist intervention in the 1980s.’ 7 Interestingly, however, while Nolan’s work was never read in relationship to, say, Janet Burchill and Kathy Temin’s explicitly feminist incursions, we could read aspects of her meandering through the heritage of Modernism in a similar continuum. Nolan’s Homework idiom, to which Tunnel/Tent Work— OVER AND OVER/AGAIN AND AGAIN 2012 belongs, takes on a new significance when seen through the prism of women’s practice. In her Homeworks, which are often made in small, domestic-sized studio spaces, Nolan focuses on low-tech labour and craft processes. Her incredibly labour-intensive hand-hooked rugs, displaying text along vertical and horizontal planes, are also included in this category. The repetitiveness Rose Nolan Australia b.1959 Tunnel/Tent Work — HARD BUT FAIR/ POINT LESS (detail) 2009 Synthetic polymer paint, hessian and cotton thread 2484 x 270 x 100cm Image courtesy: The artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Rose Nolan Rose Nolan Women’s work