Working collaboratively with City of Melbourne, Six Degrees Architects and PDG Corporation to integrate a site responsive, public artwork into the 10-storey building’s design, Nolan’s artwork utilises the perforated metal screen cladding as a bold ‘canvas’. The artwork references Queen Victoria Market’s role in social and economic exchange and is highly visible from its surroundings.
Artist statement
Screen Works (ENOUGH-NOW/EVEN/MORE-SO) aims to contribute an optimistic, complex and bold design to the screen facades of the Munro Community Hub. As a series of connected words, they conjure up a sense of perseverance; of change; of forward thinking and improvement to transition from one state to another.
Embracing the scale and proportions of the facade screens, these text-based propositions explore materials, typography, patterning and abstract form to create a motivating and surprising anchor-point to the Munro Site Western Hub. Seen from a distance, they aim to draw visitors and market goers into the environs of the market and community hub.
Proposed as verbal-visual puzzles, Screen Works (ENOUGH-NOW/EVEN/MORE-SO) utilises text as material object – ‘found’ text that is derived from the everyday where words are chosen for their visual presence, formal qualities and linguistic content. Words are separated from the stream of continuous talk and given a fresh existence within the public realm, transforming the space in which they’re located. By making language concrete in this way, meaning is allowed to be approached differently.
Using a hard-edged geometric font, each horizontal and vertical element builds on another so that letters and language provide the visual and material structure to the work that is emphatic in attitude and architectural in scope. Form and content are enmeshed utilising the modular units of the perforated and powder-coated screen panels. Screen Works (ENOUGH-NOW/EVEN/MORE-SO) describes a concern for economy; a desire to be responsive to site; an interest in seriality and repetition; and the importance of language, interactivity, and the experience of the viewer.
About the artist
Rose Nolan is a Melbourne-based artist who works across a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking. Her practice regularly oscillates between the discrete and the monumental and is informed by a strong interest in architecture, interior and graphic design combining formal concerns with the legacies of modernism.
Nolan’s works are held in important public collections, including: the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; and Monash University Museum of Art.
Rose Nolan is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.