by Ashley Crawford

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

–      William Blake: The Tyger (from Songs Of Experience)

What happens when a mouse breeds with a tiger? And, in this day and age, is this such a ridiculous question? On the good side, both creatures are classified as Mammalia, but that’s about where the luck runs out. A tiger falls under the order of Carnivora, whilst a mouse heralds from Rodentia. Both find homes in the jungle, but mice are also inclined to shelter in your walls. Life becomes a little tricky when you’re laying a trap for a Mousetiger – you can’t use a mouse for bait – that would be a form of intra-species cannibalism and of course cheese is far from a tiger’s favourite feast.

But it gets worse. These aren’t even Carnivora. They are based on the extinct Tasmanian Tiger – more marsupial than mammal and a creature grossly misrepresented by early Colonial artists, a fiction even before extinction. And, to make it worse still, there’s a chilling aspect of reality here – Australian scientists have in fact managed to inject thylacine DNA into a mouse foetus, leading to the resurrection of thylacine cartilage.

These are the kind of problems that Caroline Rothwell has to worry about in her laboratory. The lab is in fact comprised of converted bathroom and kitchen in Sydney’s inner suburbs, where vats of polyvinyl chloride bubble maliciously.

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is just one of many materials Rothwell utilises to create her hybrids, but this is perhaps apt given that one source of the origins of the Chimaera trails back to the Lycian Way in southwest Turkey where vents in the earth emit burning methane into the air. Chemists use PVC to funnel methane. Rothwell uses PVC to funnel ideas.

For time immemorial humans have tinkered with nature in the telling of stories. They have grafted humans onto fish – the Mermaid; and horses – the Minotaur. A lion sprouts a snake or a scorpion as its tail as the Manticore. The oceans and remote islands crawl with the malformed and the bizarre, worlds that Aristotle dubbed “ho exo topos” – essentially the “outside world” – the world explored by H.G. Wells in his 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau and almost 100 years later by David Cronenberg in his 1986 re-make of The Fly.

This is also the world of Caroline Rothwell, a place where the rational, scientific mind meets the irrational, rampant imagination. In the past she has created strange, inflatable black islands that seemed to throb with life and gothic hints of turrets and fortifications. In her Lexicon series Rothwell has begun to forest her environs, the gnarled results resembling the shadows of a post-nuclear blast. These are Newton’s rationalist trees – gravity – and Darwin’s Tree of Life – evolution – meeting the Hebrew Tree of Knowledge – belief.

Here we see the Moustiger as a wee embryo, a strange little creature, its’ distended umbilical cord preparing to coil around the body. Grown up, these creatures have much in common with the Ouroboros, the mythical self-consuming snake or dragon that eats its own tail. The legend of the Ouroboros suggested cycles that begin anew as soon as they end, an eternal self-consumption.

Rothwell is creating her own world, a world that fluctuates between solidity and an amorphous vulnerability. She invites her viewers into this alternate reality fully aware that we will be thrown off-balance by her bizarre menagerie, by her peculiarly deformed flora and fauna. She is rewriting Charles Darwin’s Origin of The Species with a surrealist scalpel into a kind of repellant science fiction.

One of the strange joys of Rothwell’s work is it’s shape-shifting in terms of categorization. For her 2008 Artspace exhibition writer Christine Morrow argued well for her works as “monuments” and of course the massive Blowback sculpture in that show, also exhibited at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, was indeed monumental. Elsewhere writers have argued the influence of colonialism on Rothwell’s work, and indeed, she has been inspired at times by the Colonials – her 2006 site-specific work Terminus was inspired in part by a 1793 drawing of Sydney Cove by convict artist Thomas Watling. In 2008 she was curated into the massive neo goth – back in black exhibition at the University of Queensland Art Museum, thus placing her within the realm of the Gothic.

But such catgorisations: the “Monument,” the “Colonial” and the “Gothic” while relevant, all collapse under the weight of evidence. Her Monuments have the ability to deflate and tend to throb with ventilated air, tendencies far removed from the usual notions of a granite or marble monument. Like Watling, whose depictions of Australia had more in common with Sussex than Sydney, her works are essentially fictions, but at least Watling was rooted in more ‘normal’ depictions of nature. It is also not hard to see Rothwell’s work as ‘gothic’ with its’ taste for the macabre.

But one could also read her work as political, a commentary on the current environmental meltdown (Blowback, for instance, is a term for catastrophic secret ops). Or they could be a commentary on genetic engineering gone awry.

Or perhaps these creatures, this flora and fauna, have simply adapted to survive within Rothwell’s feverish imagination. The native white heron has grown four legs and extra heads to traverse Rothwell’s world. The mouse has indeed inter-bred with the tiger to forage these strange lands. Neither apocalyptic nor Utopian, this is exo topos – a world related to, but simultaneously far removed, from our own. A world of strange beauty and bewildering wonderment.

at TOLARNO GALLERIES

Transmutation, a pre-Darwinian word used to describe ideas of evolutionary change is also an alchemical term referring to the attempt to change a base metal into a precious metal. Both these terms are relevant to Caroline Rothwell’s practice where science, art and perception collide.

Rothwell’s work revolves around our relationship with the natural world, particularly how the unintended consequences of our past crash into present and future technologies and environmental politics. Her work also explores very sculptural concerns where ideas of monumentality and process are challenged. Form gains a sense of liquidity, what appears light may be tremendously heavy or vice versa, industrial materials are hand-crafted. Things are never quite as they seem.

by Jonathan Turner

Cinema is filled with examples of the chaos that ensues when some sort of creature is genetically engineered, scientifically altered or simply thrust into a man-made time-warp. Such classic films as Frankenstein, The Fly, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Godzilla, The Day of the Triffids, King Kong and Jurassic Park provide us with strict cautionary tales telling us that if you tamper with Mother Nature, it isn’t too long before the screaming starts. It doesn’t matter if it is supposed to be extinct: the dinosaur always bites back. But wittingly or not, scientists, explorers and missionaries have been altering nature for centuries – wiping out species, clashing with cultures, introducing hybrids. Using her studio as a surreal laboratory, Caroline Rothwell performs similar experiments focusing on the modification of plants and animals, each time in her own imaginative, subversive and unexpected way.

Over the past few years Rothwell has been exploring an imaginary jungle of hybrids and uncanny life-forms. She creates bizarre sub-species of flora and fauna made from vinyl, nylon, nickel, bronze and toxic molten metals. Ranging from the miniature to the monumental, Rothwell’s sculptures, drawings and anthropomorphic installations are new pioneers in the evolutionary chain. In her unique world, the tropical meets the temperate, the extinct collides with the futuristic, the hunted becomes the heroic, and the ordinary is seen as comic.

Born in Hull, studying in London and New York, and having lived in both New Zealand and Australia, Rothwell is particularly keen on one aspect of the post-colonial world, namely the biological invasion that the early European settlers made on the landscape as they migrated into unchartered territories, both real and romantic. The extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger, or thylacine, the last specimen of which is believed to have died in captivity in 1936, is a case which fascinates Rothwell. Exterminated as a pest by bounty hunters, scientists are now attempting to “recreate” the species through genetic manipulation and advances in DNA technology, using a mouse as a host. Basing her research on colonial drawings, museum displays and faulty scientific studies, Rothwell has beaten them to it. She has re-imagined the Tasmanian Tiger as a cross between a cuddly soft toy and a nightmarish beast. (”I am not trying to recreate the specimen, I am just providing a different take on it”).

A trio of Rothwell’s tigerish creatures cast in bronze, ranging from a puppy-like example chewing its own tail to a fully grown adult, has recently been imported from the former colonies back ‘home’ to Mother England. They now stand guard at The Economist Plaza in St James. The effect is perturbing.

“My improbable creatures say more about human psychology than animal biology,” says Rothwell. “My source materials range wide, across such ideas as the representations of ‘otherness’ as portrayed in Victorian natural history museums, mass-produced plastic toys, books on weeds and the unintended consequences of contact when European voyagers arrived in new lands. I spend a lot of time researching 18th Century encyclopedia, and the ‘wrongness’ of some of the illustrations. In each consecutive edition, you can tell that the drawing of an exotic animal comes from the same starting image, often entirely based on someone else’s description. As it changes over time, it’s like a game of Chinese whispers.”

These ideas result in mutant, poetic forms, creating a kind of ‘nature jamming’ that belies categorization. Her sculpture Puff and Hind (2009), for example, shows a white deer, its antlers twisted into a shape combined with DNA strands. Clinging to its hind legs is an enlarged, black amoebic form, upsetting the equilibrium of one of nature’s proud beasts. Cast in powder-coated metal, the black form is a smaller, heavier replica of Rothwell’s earlier inflatable installation made from a balloon of stitched nylon and an electric fan, the shape inspired by the cloud produced by an explosion.

Rothwell’s menagerie is a celebration of the macabre. Steed (2009) is a prancing black stallion. The back of the horse’s neck has been sliced, and droplets of blood form a stylized lasso emerging from its mane. Meanwhile, Prey (2009) depicts a torrent of diving wildlife – birds, fish, a caterpillar, plants – represented in their normal sequence in the food-chain. The overall form of this sculpture, painted dark burgundy in colour, mimics the filigree centre-pieces found in colonial dining rooms. Previously in her exhibition entitled The Law of Unintended Consequences (2007), Rothwell tackled the Victorian habit of turning unfamiliar beasts into symbols of dominion, revealing a fetish for collecting, miniaturizing and sweetening foreign fauna into decorative knick-knacks.

Slamina (’animals’ backwards) at Maddox Arts can be seen as a continuation of Rothwell’s recent Exotopos show at GrantPirrie Gallery in Sydney,in which Rothwell suggested a state beyond our usual conception, a place ho exo topos (outside or beyond region). In London, she also incorporates the human animal into the mix. Rothwell’s skeletal figures are influenced by early European anatomical drawings in which man is favorably compared to animals. Made from nickel-plated Britannia metal (which shines an almost impossibly bright silver), they are incongruous, spectral beings, depicting a poppy flower, a horse skull or a massive mouth grafted on to the body of a man.

“These are contemporary totems born from 21^st century conundrums, industrial materials and an imperfect casting process,” says the artist. “Sometimes the surface is fractured, there are bulbous sections, missing lumps, other elements are thin and delicate. The rib-cages, for instance, are very flat with little sense of volume. It is about rupturing the illusion.”

Poppyhead, Horseman and their colleagues also resemble the silver votive figures found in many Catholic churches, left as thanks by the devout for answered prayers or for the cure of physical ailments. These symbolic and anatomical figurines, too, contain dents and fractures in their shiny surfaces.

Material and process are inherent to Rothwell’s practice. Her sculptures can simultaneously appear to be as light as a feather or as heavy as steel. Solids seem fluid. Her unique production method, whereby molten metal is poured into a casing of stitched fabric, creates an ‘over-stuffed’, voluminous object, complete with skin-like creases. Traces of the weaving in the fabric can still be seen on the surfaces, while nickel-plating and powder-coating lend an industrial sheen.

The sinewy forms of plants are rendered in black PVC in Rothwell’s Lexicon series. Her sheets of tangled botany are suspended from the ceiling and draped onto the floor. Rothwell turns a slick and synthetic material, into hand-cut “landscape drawings”, in which silhouettes of leaves and fronds emerge from a lacework of cuts. Concentric openings suggest the topographical contours of a map. The sharp outlines echo Rothwell’s black ink drawings, hinting at the murky world of Rorschach tests and shadow puppets. Fragile and fetishist, the sliced PVC exposes the irregularities of trial and error. Scalpel nicks and wavering lines disclose the imperfections of human manufacture.

In Rothwell’s disconcerting Wonderland, aberration is the norm. In one of her most recent drawings, also reproduced as a cut-out from PVC, she depicts the mythic apple-tree under which Newton devised his theories of physics. The tree, which can also be seen as the tree of knowledge from the garden of Eden (and hence the root of the original sin), is suspended from the heavens by what appears to be the regulated grid of a bar-code. In the topsy turvy, natural world of Caroline Rothwell, in a place where the hemispheres happily invert, gravity is blithely reversed.