Rose Nolan has been doing things with words since the 1980s. Her expansive practice has included the production of books, small sculptures, photographs, posters, paintings, banners, multiples, and large-scale installations. One throughline across all these mediums has been a preoccupation with the fraught dynamics between language, lettering, and formalism in artmaking. Her work has inventively borrowed, and in the process sloganised, snippets (usually single words or phrases) from books, catalogues, advertising, and everyday conversation. In the spirit of Nolan’s commitment to the ethos of the twentieth-century avant-garde—with all the ferocious ambition and utopian possibility that was invested in artmaking—we might call this spatial poetics.