WorksThe kotuku is the native white heron, a bird that, in Mäori culture, symbolises all things beautiful and rare. The saying ‘He Kotuku rerenga tahi’ refers to the white heron as a bird of single flight—a sight seen perhaps only once in a lifetime.
Inspired by the kotuku from the bird halls at Canterbury Museum, Caroline Rothwell’s work will float on a large pond in the Botanic Gardens. For a moment it may seem to startled passers-by as if a pure white heron has momentarily landed in Christchurch on its flight over the Southern Alps. August/September is the season when the kotuku leave their winter haunts and head for the secret breeding colony at Okarito on the West Coast of the South Island—the only nesting colony of kotuku in the world.
Caroline Rothwell’s sculpture is concerned with the ways that light and shade and the tricks of visual perspective distort our experience of form. With three birds’ heads arising from a single glistening white body, Kotuku appears like a three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot, each side forming a mirror image of the other. The result is a haunting and enigmatic work, at once strongly recognisable as the native heron but also—like the inkblot used in psychological testing—an abstract form ready to engage with the viewer’s imagination.
Kotuku continues Rothwell’s interest in giving concrete sculptural form and a sense of enhanced scale to ephemeral things of beauty from the natural world. Previously she has worked with flowers, inkblots and shadows, rendering these forms in three-dimensions and on a massive scale. The kotuku, the native white heron, is a natural progression of these ideas, in a site-specific sculpture conceived especially for Christchurch. With Kotuku, Rothwell reveals a sense of the uncanny—Sigmund Freud’s term for a psychological state whereby the familiar is made suddenly strange—which lurks beneath the surface of the natural world.
Caroline Rothwell is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary sculptors. Her large-scale work has featured in many major exhibitions in Wellington and Auckland over the last couple of years, and is included in the collection of Te Papa. Kotuku is her first work in Christchurch.
Lara Strongman is a curator and writer who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Formerly Deputy Director and Senior Curator at City Gallery Wellington, she is currently a PhD candidate in the Art History Department, Victoria University of Wellington.
Presented as part of Terminus 2006, Hybrid is a site-specific artwork, influenced by a drawing of Sydney Cove by convict artist, Thomas Watling in 1793. The drawing is the artist’s first impression of a gum tree in the Australian landscape, then a daunting new frontier. Rather than a botanical representation, the drawing resembles an idyllic English pastoral scene, leading us to question the projected ideologies of colonial Australia.
Rothwell has created a structure which, like colonial Australia, is full of contradictions. Although it is a natural form, Hybrid is a constructed species, simultaneously organic and toxic. Undermining the authority of the traditional public monument, Hybrid is made from plastic and its volume is created from air. By referring to the tensions associated with Australia’s post-colonial status, the sculpture questions the impact of non-indigenous Australians on both the natural and sociological foundations of this continent. This hybrid form is estranged, an alien upon the landscape, yet also riddled with its own anxiety to survive and to belong.
All the pieces exhibited here were made during Caroline Rothwell’s three-month residency at the Lakeside Arts Centre at the University of Nottingham. Rothwell is known for her work as a sculptor, but recently her practice has been focused more on site-based drawing, working directly on the wall with signwriters’ vinyl. Her motifs have been flowers, plants, birds and shadows, and her underlying concerns the modification of nature, the collecting of specimens and the search for utopia. The prospect of returning to make work in England for the first time in ten years has enabled a number of latent possibilities in her work to come together, and a personal journey has been undertaken in a heightened awareness of a longer, and sometimes troubling, history of exchanges.
The new work has one predominant motif- the weed. It must be more than a coincidence that a number of other contemporary artists have also become preoccupied with weeds as a subject (one thinks, for example, of Paul Morrison, Michael Landy, Jacques Nimki), but the weed has a particular significance in a New Zealand context. One of the sources Rothwell uses for her imagery is a book by F W Hilgendorf entitled The Weeds of New Zealand, first published in 1926; it has the significant subheading “and how to eradicate them”. A weed is regarded as a plant in the wrong place, its presence in field or garden inimical to profit and pleasure. The majority of the weeds of New Zealand originated from England, and could only have been introduced by human activity, since New Zealand is so far removed from other land masses that it is beyond the reach of the natural agencies of dispersal (seeds carried by birds or wind). Its remote situation meant that it once had a self contained ecosystem that was almost unique in the world. This isolation ended with the arrival of first Polynesian and later European settlers, but it was the systematic colonisation by the British in the mid nineteenth-century, instigated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his ideal of another, improved England on the far side of the world, which really initiated significant disruptions to the natural environment of the islands, leading even, in the strong terms of a recent commentator, to a ‘biological holocaust’.
The distinction between desirable and undesirable plants can only be made in relation to ideas of culture, and the language in which weeds are described is inevitably loaded, steeped in the values of the social and political world and permeated by anxieties about national character, integrity and purity. Weeds are relentless invaders and colonisers, they are tough and persistent, aggressive and successful; they are aliens, competing with our interests, threatening our fragile natural economies and our native botanical treasures; they must be resisted, contained and, if need be, eradicated. The weeds that Wakefield and his followers brought often flourished more strongly in the propitious new climate than they had done in England, though they ended by compromising the very nature of the new arcadia. By the late twentieth-century, the full extent of the ecological damage could be acknowledged. But the evidence of a counter-invasion was also becoming unmistakable. According to the conservation body Plantlife, the New Zealand pigmyweed is now the most pernicious of the fifteen plants regarded as most invasive in Britain, its prevalence here described as ‘a disease of the ecosystem’, one that threatens to overwhelm native habitats and even to smother the starfruit, one of the rarest wild flowers.
Rothwell has given the title Weed Garden to the largest piece in this exhibtion, the seven suspended ‘drawings’ on sheets of PVC. The title plays on an obvious contradiction, one that goes to the heart of the principles of selection and exclusion involved in the management of a garden. A garden of weeds would be a neglected, failed or abandoned garden, or perhaps an alternative one, a site of resistance to prevailing convention.
Rothwell’s sources for her weed images are diverse. Her choices serve to prompt a series of reflections on plants and their proper place, and how this is always relative. Plants act as emblems of identity and take their meaning from particular locations and contexts; they can be invested with a potent symbolic value, but no system of values is ever fixed. Running in parallel to this cultivation of uncertainty, her own artistic strategies – her use of materials and scale, her formal procedures – also deliberately work against any expectations we might have of botanical representation, twisting away both from the conventions of scientific illustration and any lingering assumptions about drawing plants as an essentially feminine practice.
The image of the manuka, or tea tree, is derived from a drawing made for Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Captain Cook on the expedition of the Endeavour to the South Seas (1768-71), one of the consequences of which was the European rediscovery of New Zealand, the mapping of its coast and the collecting and documentation of botanical specimens. The image functions here as a botanical emblem of the beginning of a relationship between two cultures and two ecosystems, (its display in Nottingham is curiously appropriate, since the location is geographically speaking roughly half way between Banks’s two midland domains in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire). Another image in the Weed Garden is that of the silver fern, once the bane of New Zealand’s farmers but now a national emblem: the source this time is a specimen from the natural history collections of Wollaton Hall, once again an image that strays across borders, collapsing radically different times and spaces together. Other images are based on the volume The Weeds of New Zealand already mentioned, while yet another is based on the artist’s first hand drawing of weeds in her own garden; in this case, the plant forms are overlaid in rambling, embroiling traces as opposed to the usual format of a single image emblazoned on the field.
The images are transferred to the large scale by resolutely low-tech means, photocopied on to acetate and projected on to the large sheets of clear PVC. The forms are traced out using signwriters’ vinyl, a material with no fine art associations, and certainly none with botanical illustration, though its usage will be familiar from any urban street, where signs are as ubiquitous as weeds. The vinyl comes in rolls of strong solid colour, and the action of cutting into it confounds the practices of drawing and sculpture. In their commercial form, the cutting is done mechanically, without inflection, but Rothwell’s ‘drawing’ is visibly hand-made, more like a painterly trace than an industrial process. Hanging in situ, the space beyond each sheet becomes as much a part of the piece as the elongated coloured shards heat-sealed upon its surface, and because they are suspended like hangings and lit by a combination of natural and artificial light, the configurations also cast shadows on the wall, as if the light beam that carried the original image has continued its journey, throwing out an unstable after-image, a faintly mobile trace. Some sheets are done in a reflective vinyl, capable of bringing about an abrupt colour change with the angle of light: the effect is like a roadside weed suddenly flashed up in a headlamp. The enlargement of the original image makes the weeds appear as big as shrubs, but it also relates them to a human scale, suggesting analogies between their branching forms and the system of veins and capillaries within the body.
At the opposite end of the scale, Wonderland consists of a grouping of diminutive forms arranged on plinths. Some of these are derived from the leaf-shape of weeds, while others are taken from birds, some living, others that are endangered or extinct. They are made by cutting simple templates from old pillow cases, sewn together in threes to form moulds which are then filled with molten lead, itself re-cycled from redundant church organ pipes. In this way, stuff, which was once soft and comforting, is brought into conjunction with something hardening and toxic. These tabletop sculptures are as dense and heavy as the Weed Garden is open and transparent, and are suggestive of some Victorian parlour game, or a phalanx of misshapen ornaments. The mutated lead figurines bulge like topiary in a miniature garden, a sinister throng of curious new life forms coming together in a fantastic reduction of the natural world.
Nicholas Alfrey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Nottingham. He recently co-curated The Art of the Garden for Tate Britain and his recent project ‘Land Art and the Culture of Landscape’ can be seen at www.landscape.ac.uk.
Essay on Kotuku.
Shadows are not part of the real world, but the appearance of a shadow testifies to the solidity of an object, for what casts a shadow must be real.
E. H. Gombrich, 1995
But there is one thing which the severest and mildest cases all have in common, and which is equally found in parapraxes and chance actions: the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material, which, although pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for expressing itself.
Sigmund Freud, 1904
For some time now, a shadow has been abroad in Caroline Rothwell’s work. It first appeared three years with a disconcerting literality in an installation of three sculptures (Shadows, 1999). Roughly figure-shaped and of human scale, these pink pearlescent fibreglass works purported to be casts of the artist’s own shadow. It’s impossible, of course, to draw one’s own shadow, let alone to cast it and render it as a solid form, but there remains something extraordinarily emotionally compelling in the idea that perhaps one could—and as if by analyzing the resultant form, one could approach a new method of character divination, a kind of psychomancy in three dimensions. A shadow is a projection of oneself into another realm. Subject to the laws of the natural world and yet somehow supernatural in its manifestation as an analogue of the self, the shadow is at once familiar and ungraspable, an uncanny image. It is this spectre of an alter ego—the dark possibility of an alternative self shadowing one’s ‘real’ life—that haunts Rothwell’s recent work.
A digression: there is a historical, or at least mythological, precedent for Rothwell’s solid shadows. In his Natural History of the world, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described the first work of art, which he attributed to a Greek woman who drew the silhouette of her departing lover by tracing the shadow of his head cast by candlelight on the wall. Her father, a potter from Corinth, filled in the outline with clay and modelled the man’s features in relief so that his daughter would have a likeness to remember her lover by. Two millennia later, Marcel Duchamp’s self-portrait Quand on ne rit pas à se décrocher la mâchoire (1959) may have borne more than a passing resemblance to the shadowy head of the potter’s daughter’s lover. In Duchamp’s work, a plaster cast of his cheek and jaw is affixed to a line drawing of his profile. It refers to the late 19th century vogue for mysterious facial impressions cast in wet plaster which mediums were claiming to have received as talismans from the spirit world in seances. The English language title of Duchamp’s portrait, With My Tongue in My Cheek, suggests an ironic reading of the work, which was produced towards the end of his life as he withdrew from the world while being pursued by the demi-mondaine, a fugitive from the cult of personality—With My Tongue in My Cheek is a message from the not-yet-dead, a pre-post-humous relic of the aging artist.
Like the mythical clay relief and Duchamp’s mid-twentieth century plaster mould, Rothwell’s shadow self-portraits are occult objects, supernatural talismans that guard against loss and which keep memory alive. And like the plaster impressions of departed spirits from the late 19th century which inspired Duchamp, there is an undertow of fin de siecle decadence in Rothwell’s twenty-first century practice. This cranky quasi-Victorian sensibility is most clearly evident in the large wall drawings of flowering plants first seen in her 1999 exhibition at Artspace Auckland, ‘Measure of Strangeness’, which have subsequently burgeoned across the country.
Rothwell’s flower drawings are shadow projections; simplified botanical line drawings taken from old books or drawn directly from nature, photocopied on to acetate and projected on to the gallery wall using an old-fashioned overhead device. Often wrapping around the corner of a room, the resulting drawings, made with vinyl tape which follows the cast shadow-lines, involve an expressionistic distortion of the original image, like the looming ghostly shadows of film noir. While the medium, commercial signwriters’ adhesive vinyl, is slick and contemporary, the effect of the work is far more idiosyncratic and a-historical: hand-cut with a scalpel and placed piece by piece on the wall of the gallery by the artist, there is a neurotic, tentative quality to the line, the traces of false starts and burrs and multiple cuts—the pathology of making—left clearly visible.
Lily0.0;0 / (2001) is the most distinctly ‘gothic’ of these tape drawings. The image depicts an enormous arum lily writhing across the walls, a sinuous, fecund image of blooms, leaves, stems and roots that dwarfs the viewer. For the Victorians, the lily was a funerary flower, indelibly associated with death. While the white lily is traditionally a symbol of purity and is commonly used today in wedding bouquets, the rare black lily has more sinister connotations. Virtue’s dark twin, the black lily intimates a symbolic decadence and at times an actual deliquescence: various of its botanical forms, including Arum dioscoridis, the Mediterranean species pictured by Rothwell, exude a carrion- or dung-like perfume.
Lily recalls Charles Baudelaire’s 19th century equation of the modern, the artificial, and the decadent. Author of Les Fleurs du Mal or The Flowers of Evil (1861), Baudelaire argued in favour of artificiality, suggesting that vice is natural in that it is selfish, whereas virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. By doing so he extended the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy of evil, expounded in his erotic novel Justine (1791), the first draft of which he wrote while incarcerated in the Bastille for an ‘unnatural crime’: ‘There are two positions available to us—either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Therese, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?’ De Sade’s fictional characters, the sisters Justine, the pitiful victim of virtue, and the corrupt and villainous Juliette who triumphs in a cesspit of degradation, can be seen as two halves of a whole, the good and the bad twin. With this construction, De Sade anticipates the theories of early 20th century analytical psychologist C.G.Jung, who identified the shadow as an integral component of the psyche—an unconscious, instinctive aspect of human personality, the dark side that we keep hidden, expressed only in dreams and fantasies, and which, if kept repressed for too long, will incubate within the fetid dark and manifest itself in a spree of criminal action. Sinister and gravid, operating in the dank and shadowy side of beauty, Rothwell’s hot-house flowers unleash the troubling, amoral sexuality of the natural world into the artificial realm of the gallery.
A related series of exterior works by Rothwell are Shadows (Flowers and Weeds) (2001), produced a few months after Lily. Beginning by tracing the shadows cast by iris plants and toy missiles, Rothwell constructed and stitched fabric moulds reinforced by fibreglass in which she cast solid concrete forms. In this process, the moulds bulge unpredictably with the heavy weight of the poured concrete, deforming the shadow drawings still further. Rothwell arranged the resulting objects in formation like a battalion on the ground, casting indecipherable shadows of their own as the sun moves around them. Hovering between likeness and abstraction, between the decorative and the frankly monstrous, with their strange protuberances and tumescences the cast concrete botanicals are oddly phallic in relation to the unabashedly vulval quality of the flower drawings.
Like Rothwell’s earlier works, Shadows (Flowers and Weeds) and the more recent giant Weed 1-4 PVC wall hangings(2002) can be related to Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unheimlich, or uncanny, a psychological phenomenon whereby the familiar is made strange. In his famous essay of 1919, Freud traced the etymology of the German word and discovered that it simultaneously referred to the domestic environment and also to what is kept hidden, or repressed. Freud posited from this that the uncanny represents the reappearance of repressed material from childhood, surfacing as if from nowhere but with a strange feeling of prior knowledge in the subject; and it is the combination of the known and the unknown to create a new, third thing, that induces unspeakable fear and unease in the subject.
The genesis for Shadows (Flowers and Weeds) is an installation from 1999, Psychodiagnostics, in which Rothwell made three-dimensional versions of Rorschach ink blots. Translated from two to three dimensions, and given an almost monumental scale, the familiar ink blot shapes are made uncanny. There is a surrealistic quality to them, like Dali’s soft watches given sculptural body. Standing each about two metres high, Rothwell’s soft sculptures are constructed from sewn tarpaulins and stuffed with polyester fibre. They are three-sided, sewn along the edges of three identical flat shapes, each a mirror image of the original ink blot. The tarpaulins are of various primary colours; the forms are smooth and simplified; the effect is cheerfully Pop, almost reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s stuffed hamburgers and lipsticks; but again, it is the wavery unpredictability of Rothwell’s hand-drawn and sewn line renders them obviously individuated rather than objects of mass culture. Key works from Rothwell’s oeuvre, the Psychodiagnostics demonstrate that strange concord between minimalism and surrealism that lies at the heart of her practice.
Kotuku (2002) is Rothwell’s most ambitious work to date, using the sewn mould process pioneered in the Psychodiagnostics works. It embodies a similar tension between abstraction and representation, allowing the exigencies of the casting process—the bulging and slight slumping of the fabric mould under strain of the heavy fill—to determine the final outline of the sculpture. Eight metres in diameter, this work—a major commission for the Art + Industry biennial festival 2002—represents a three-headed version of the kotuku, or native white heron. Formed in sail-cloth moulds, and cast in fibreglass with a pearlescent white finish, the work weighs more than 600 kilos, and floats majestically on an ornamental pond in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. Like the Rorschach works, Kotuku is three-sided, each heron shape joined to the next through the middle of its head and beak: from a distance it recalls an absurdly-scaled Crown Lynn ceramic vase. In a nod to the neo-Victorian predilection for taxidermy and scientific classification which floats through Rothwell’s work (also evident in Slip 4 5 (2000), small cast porcelain works taken from laboratory glassware and poppy seed heads), this major work was inspired by the stuffed kotuku from the bird halls at nearby Canterbury Museum.
The monumental simplicity of Kotuku is miniaturised in Flock (2002), a recent installation of table-top scaled works. Here Rothwell’s repertoire of abstracted native birds is expanded to include a shag, a gull, a tern, and an albatross, as well as a small version of the white heron. Like their large parent work, the small birds are finished in a lacquered pearlescent white. Minimal in conception and surface quality, surrealist in gesture and connotation, these works are among her most successful to date. While the surrealist qualities of the objects stem, like the pearlescent pink bodily Shadows of 1999, from their very physical implausibility, their minimalism is reflected in a confident refinement that also leaves room for chance process to occur. Rothwell worked as Sol Le Witt’s studio assistant in New York for a short time in the late 1990s, and it is tempting to recognise a similar clarity and simplicity of gesture on a monumental scale in her work.
The Psychodiagnostics provide clues for the reading of much of Rothwell’s work. Like the Rorschach ink blots from which they are derived, these objects are vehicles for imaginative projection and identification on the part of the viewer. The ink blot tests were developed by Dr Hermann Rorschach in 1921, following Freud’s influential theories of projective psychoanalysis which were aimed at uncovering subconscious aspects of the psyche. At times, particularly when concerned with free association of words and images and with dream analysis, Freud’s psychotherapeutic techniques ran in direct parallel to the art practices of the Surrealists. Whereas accidents, chance, and incongruities were the raw material of the Surrealist movement, Freud saw in parapraxes—the Latin name for slips of the tongue, and other minor errors of communication—an expression of the repressed motive of the subject; or, in Jungian terms, a glimpse of the person’s shadow. Although Rorschach himself did not use the ink blots for projective psychoanalysis, they were used for this purpose by his followers, who for many years kept the shapes of the ink blots a closely guarded secret. The aim was for the subject to encounter the ink blots with no prior association or familiarity, and to reveal to the therapist what he or she ‘saw’ in them. The therapist would then analyse the import of the patient’s visions, and draw conclusions about the state of his or her mental health.
Although Rorschach tests have been discredited for many years as a legitimate form of psychotherapy (the problem being that there was no stable reference point for interpretation of the image, and hence the reading by the analyst of the ‘text’ provided by the patient was as much subject to imaginative projection as the originating inkblot), they remain a visual shorthand for denoting ‘psychology’. The Rorschach test emanates from a time when psychology was seen as much as an art as a science, when the occult world of the imagination ran in tandem with empirical observations. Many contemporary artists, including Rothwell, are currently mining similarly ‘outmoded’ texts and images from the early days of psychology. By so doing, they provide the viewer with two possible simultaneous readings of their work. Firstly, there is simply a vessel for imaginative projection, in the manner of the ink blot—the viewer is invited to complete the latent meaning of the work (to use a Freudian term) by bringing their own experience to an analysis of its content. Secondly, there is the artist’s ‘quotation’ of the ink blot (or the Jungian archetype, or the uncanny)—a means to draw the attention of the thoughtful viewer to the way in which art might function in the contemporary world.
It might be argued that all post-modern art is an inkblot in search of interpretation. Whereas early 20th century psychology made intuitive connections in a relatively stable sea of shared meaning, ontological certainty has broken down in contemporary society. The chain of meaning has been broken. Images have come adrift from their sources. To paraphrase post-modernist theorist Fredric Jameson, since the late 1970s the past has seemed to exist in fragments rather than to function as a continuous stream. This is also French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s definition of schizophrenia; to be cut loose from constant meaning, to drift away from the certainties of cause and effect. This sea of fragments is the environment in which contemporary artists operate: and in considering Caroline Rothwell’s recent work, I am struck by the certainty with which she builds a raft of new possibilities from the detritus of the past. In her work, ideologies and aesthetics which have been declared outmoded are resurrected, giving us new tools with which to think through the pre-occupations of the modern age. Art is full of hidden motives, you might say; and it is the task, perhaps, of the contemporary art historian to track them down through a maze of shadows, or at least to point at the spot from which they first came to light. Forensic detectives of the imagination, the art historian’s job involves chasing shadows, stumbling after the ungraspable in hope of piecing together the narrative connections which might re-engage meaning. It is the artist’s role to unleash those shadows upon the world.
2003
Lara Strongman is a curator and writer who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Formerly Deputy Director and Senior Curator at City Gallery Wellington, she is currently a PhD candidate in the Art History Department, Victoria University of Wellington.