Caroline Rothwell, Blowback, Artspace, Sydney, 4 to 26 April 2008

Sculptures by Caroline Rothwell mostly take the form of filled volumes created by distending  fabric and vinyl forms with air or molten metal. These volumes derive from borrowed images of plants, landscapes and other representations of the natural world. The artist starts with an outline or silhouette, modifies it and alters its scale, before using it to create her sculptural moulds. The relationship of a shadow to the form that cast it is a type of mirroring, but the mirror Rothwell employs has distortions built-in.

Her process ensures that her sculptures seldom retain direct reference to the original illustrations. Because some of these source images were produced during the colonial period of New Zealand and Australia, the two countries where she has most recently lived and worked, and involve representations of Nature with a capital ‘N’, there is a tendency for commentary on her work to focus on the way nature is conceptually framed within colonised territories.

 I am told I was approached to write this piece because I was unlikely to give the work a postcolonial or ecological treatment and, happily, I can confirm it. Doing this would be attributing too literal a ‘subject’ to it, over-reading the work as commentary and assuming an undeserved fussiness for it in a case of can’t see the wood for the trees.  Of course, there remains the issue of the very prominent sculpted bronze thylacine in Rothwell’s recent exhibition at Artspace that will be very hard for me to explain away, but I am going to do my best.

Instead I am interested in exploring the formal operations in Rothwell’s sculpture and how it symbolically engages with the idea of ’monument’. Her work exists as an architecture of shadows in a double sense: its formal devices give structure to what is ordinarily nebulous, and each sculpture functions symbolically as a monument, another name for that most shadowy of architectural forms, the tomb.

A feature of Rothwell’s work that goes unremarked in critical commentary is the fact that her sculptures are about sculpture. Her practice honours casting; she continually restages its logic in works that address casting’s procedures and methods as well as its products. The artist ordinarily stitches panels of cloth to together to create a mould into which she pours liquid metal. In the process of casting, a hollow form begets a solid one and the mould’s interior delimits the exterior of the sculpture. The textured warp and weft of Rothwell’s fabric moulds remains on the surface of the metal casts. This hints at the stripping away of cloth that has occurred and even gives the works an inside-outness that directly references their relationship to the moulds. It is as if the metal retains a memory of cloth. The sculpted form that emerges enshrines this material contact: the metal and cloth have touched, and both come away transformed.

 Referring to the fact that many of his sculptures depict everyday objects that are old-fashioned, Claes Oldenburg has said ‘as time goes by and things they represent vanish from daily use, their purely formal characteristics will be more evident: Time will undress them.’1 Rothwell undresses her sculptures with rather more haste, stripping the cloth from their surfaces not long after they have turned cold.

The moulds typically occupy two-dimensions but, unusually, the pieces that emerge from them extend into the third. Because of the way they are created — by joining outlined shapes with a seam that becomes a sharply delineated edge on the final piece — the force and weight of the molten metal pushes the cloth out between the seams and the sculptures hat emerge resemble puffy silhouettes. This connection to silhouettes ensures that the works always retain a two-dimensional logic although they simultaneously operate in the round.

And despite this tension between two and three dimensions in the work, Rothwell’s sculptures do not operate as relief as they have no true frontality. Instead they function as improbable representations and impossible geometries. Representation ordinarily involves reductions or subtractions —  diminution of the details or dimensions between the  object and its depiction — as when three-dimensional space is expressed within a two-dimensional schema. This is not only the province of art but of representation in mathematics and the physical sciences too. In one sense, reduction is at work in Rothwell’s generalised silhouettes, which flatten all surface detail and are almost diagrammatic in their simplification. But at the same time, her work reverses this tendency towards reduction. She locates and claims a three-dimensional space within the verso and recto of a two-sided figure by pushing it open from within. In her work, shadows, normally understood as intangible, command serious mass and volume.

More recently, Rothwell has used a similar preparatory method but in place of liquid metal, she inflates the vinyl shapes with air using internal fans including, for example, two connected inflatable ‘islands’ in the exhibition Blowback at Artspace. Like the metal sculptures, these works are based on creating hollow forms then filling them, with the resultant object in this case operating symbolically as both mould and cast. In the relationship between the two, Rothwell finds a correlation with that existing between a form and its shadow: a kind of mirroring and reciprocity.

Rothwell’s artwork relates to natural history in the way its subjects include the dead and the near-dead. If I had to give her sculptures a taxonomy, I would classify them all according to the existence of a backbone. The small, heavy tin alloy sculptures displayed on tables or on plinth-tops and featuring branches coming off a central column would be designated vertebrates, while the invertebrates are the stuffed forms, and those filled with air. Through a kind of artificial respiration, Rothwell’s invertebrates participate in the life processes; the ballooning action of her inflatables models that of a bladder or a lung, and they tremble and shudder as if they are breathing. In Blowback, a ligature joined one large inflatable to another, but it was impossible to tell whether it was a tow rope, an umbilicus or some other form of life support.

By giving permanency to what is ephemeral, and in their relationship to the subjects of life, death and time, Rothwell’s works adopt the form and character of monuments, objects whose purpose is deliberately commemorative. The word ‘monument’ derives from monere, the Latin verb meaning to remember, and originally referred mainly to funerary architecture. A monument always commemorates something that is already dead, since an object that never dies has no need for its existence or its memory to be prolonged. If some of her invertebrates are undergoing resuscitation, all of Rothwell’s vertebrates are long dead and fossilised. A being on life support is something ephemeral trying hard to be eternal, while a fossil is of course its own tomb; between them, they represent two different means of perpetuation. The function of a monument is to ‘speak the past forward into the future’ according to a storage and retrieval model: it operates as an inexpendable stockpile of memory sent forth into the future to be drawn from continually without ever being depleted.

More than a representation of the past, a monument is a past form of representing the past — doubly past — because the building of monuments is now unfashionable. Instead of building deliberate structures for the purpose of commemoration, people now prefer to select their monuments from the world of readymades according to a process of nominalism, as is the case with Flanders Fields and concentration camps, sites whose original purpose was never commemorative. According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, all works of art are monuments. Moreover, in What is Philosophy?, they argue that ‘the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that provide the event with the compound that celebrates it. The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation.’ 2 Symbolically, a monument operates not to keep something from the past but to set the stage for its potential return in the future, a return that is never entirely assured.

Of all Rothwell’s fossils, the bronze thylacine that appeared in Blowback at Artspace is a symbol of the most extreme posteriority. Not merely dead but extinct too: a kind of double death. This animal, however, seems far from it: in her installation, it stalked a strange metal portal as if about to walk through it, thereby staging its own dramatic return.

Blowback, the title Rothwell selected for her recent show, is a concept that belongs to the world of espionage and refers to unplanned consequences that emerge from covert operations. Often it refers to what happens when spies plant false stories in foreign media only to find the stories grow legs and are reported back elsewhere, including in the agent’s own country where they are repeated as if simple fact. These false stories gain a currency and, after being seeded by agents, circulate autonomously much like the ‘weeds’ Rothwell depicts in so many of her works. Blowback is not merely the problem of ‘the return of the repressed’, it is the problem of ephemera that does not disappear on cue but hangs around a little too long. Monuments too are a kind of blowback, a symbol planted in the future bringing with it fabulations from the past.

Rothwell’s bronze and tin alloy sculptures may endure the ravages of time largely unchanged. For the inflatable works, though, when the exhibition comes to a close, the plugs are pulled out, the fans turned off and the forms collapse back on to the floor where we always secretly expect shadows to remain. Time will undress them in the same way that time gives everything a dressing down — each island never more monumental than when it lies in ruin.

notes

1. Claes Oldenburg, Object into monument, Pasadena Art

Museum, Pasadena, 1971, p. 9.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?,

Verso, London, 1994, pp. 167–8.

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.

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.

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.

Caroline Rothwell’s drawings, sculptures and installations consider evolving relationships between humans and the natural environment. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources, from first contact drawings to site-specific historical archives, her works extend the apparent objectivity of these found references into fictive territory. The natural becomes peculiar and un-natural, the familiar strange.

In her silver-plated sculptures animals and plants morph into hybrid forms creating toxic tableaux. The impossible little metallic creatures gleam with a kind of fake purity that belies their deviant form. Cast from hand-sewn fabric moulds, the surfaces retain the texture of cloth and appear, despite their solid heaviness, like stuffed toys.

Indeed, Rothwell’s interest in playing with the materiality of her forms turns largely on this contrast between the characteristics we associate with the handcrafted, and those that denote the urban and mass produced. Tactility and delicacy are weighed against the stark, uniform qualities of unnatural substances. In her wall drawings, for example, Rothwell hand-cuts pvc sign-writers vinyl to create large-scale calligraphic landscapes that stretch anamorphously across architectural spaces. Representing natural forms using industrial materials, Rothwell subtly subverts our expectations of the mass produced by insisting on the presence of the hand-made, of human intervention.

Rothwell’s manipulation of scale likewise cultivates a certain ambiguity. Her sculptural incarnations of flora and fauna are always wildly out of proportion – either monumental or miniature – lending a quality of surreal fantasy to the forms. The resulting works, strangely humorous and often nostalgic, draw the viewer into a realm of possibility in which the natural, man-made and imaginary collide.

The 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

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.

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.

Terminus Projects

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.

On those relentlessly hot July afternoons, Ada liked to sit on a cool piano stool of ivoried wood at a white-oilcoth’d table in the sunny music room, her favourite botanical atlas open before her, and copy out in colour some singular flower. She might choose, for instance, an insect-mimicking orchid which she would proceed to enlarge with remarkable skill. Or else she combined one species with another (unrecorded but possible), introducing odd little changes and twists that seemed almost morbid in so young a girl so nakedly dressed. 1.

Ada
Vladimir Nabokov

In Vladimir Nabokov’s baroquely overwritten last novel incestuous couplings and languid corruption are entwined with the figures of the butterfly and the orchid. Sex and death are tangled in the sticky heat of summer. Two impossibly precocious and perverse children, Ada and Van, infest the trees and attics of a country estate, lingering over erotic encyclopaedia and medieval medical texts.

The cloying profusion of Nabokov’s novel brings to mind the shiny curls of Caroline Rothwell’s vinyl banners, the nacreous prettiness of her glossy porcelain ornaments and the distorted geometries of her huge flower wall drawings. Ornament-sized works, flying birds folding in axial symmetries, are multiplied by mirrored plinths. Wavering, looming, anamorphic flowers fail to resolve themselves into appropriate perspective, their correct proportions available only from an inaccessible corner or from behind some locked door of the gallery.

Rothwell’s materials have a toxic iridescence – carcinogenic polyvinyl chloride, toluene-laden nail varnish, noxious clouds of automotive lacquer. In her work the pretty and delicate merge with the monstrous and imposing. The enormous distorted blooms of her wall drawings suggest an ominous plenitude; her creepy knick-knacks evoke the pale fleshy bracts of deep-sea worms. Her work plays with tropes of the feminine, the subject matter of lady painters and gentlewomen gardeners. She takes pleasure in the rude fecundity of flowers and weeds, the excess and sadism of saccharine fairy tales where things turn out badly.

Sometimes lurid and unwholesome, sometimes pearly pretty, her works toy with symmetry. Distortion and repetition are key to her methodology, from the stretch of anamorphic projections in her banners and wall drawings to the axial reflections of her bird sculptures. Distortion twists the familiar into new shapes. The inversions and multiplications of reflection reduces forms to motifs susceptible to mechanical reproduction, suggesting a proliferation beyond the bounds of the works – works which are themselves often located on reflecting surfaces of water or mirror.

The shiny seamlessness of the industrial materials Rothwell chooses is subverted by the artist’s handiwork – the wavering freehand lines of her vinyl drawings and banners, the visible stitching of her moulds. Public scale is also undermined. Shadows (flowers and weeds), commissioned for Te Papa, was shown grouped in an outdoor courtyard. Concrete, a heavy, permanent exterior material was cast in sewn fabric moulds, creating short, plump forms. The thigh-high concrete objects are part missile, part chandelier. Still bearing the texture and stitching of their canvas mould, they are a little pretty, a little absurd, a little menacing. En masse, they represent variations on a theme, like the miniscule, but taxonomically useful bristled chitin penises of beetles, little grappling hooks designed to snap off inside the female to deter further suitors. The work might be read as a spoof of our national museum’s regime of access and interactivity – human-size fiberglass spiders and displays of creepy crawlies encourage us to empathise, rather than squish, but the gory details of insect sex are not so easily tamed.

Standing in the clear windy sunlight of a Wellington afternoon the work is stalked by its shadows. A blot, an interruption of the light, shadows and silhouettes appear frequently in Rothwell’s work. Together they represent a bare minimum of information – the bird’s outline against the bright sky is all the ornithologist needs. In an earlier work the artist attempted to trace the path of her moving shadow – an impossible task. Silhouettes are ambiguous, like shadows they slip and change. Rothwell’s weed banners on clear PVC fill the outline of uprooted plants with bright bands and circles of colour. Set out from the gallery walls these silhouettes cast doubling shadows – weeds as wallpaper scrawling up the white surface.

The ambitions and failures of domestication form a subtext to many of Rothwell’s works. The preponderance of pearl finishes reflects a pleasure in surface and a preference for the girlier side of the colour chart, but it should be remembered how the pearl is itself formed – layers of fluid nacre coating a jagged shard of shell or sand. The pearl is the oyster’s attempt to make the intrusions of the world outside its shell bearable. In substance the pearl is palliative, with irritation at its center. The pearl is a gleaming testament to the power of home improvement. Embedded in the oyster’s soft flesh the pearl is at once beautiful and grotesque – the Baroque itself taking its name from the Portuguese barocco, or misshapen pearl.

The pearl’s solidifying nacre reflects Rothwell’s preferred method of casting, which allows fluid shapes to clot, becoming hard and impervious. Rothwell’s castings create ambivalent objects – solid but sagging forms. For Kotuku, her project for Art and Industry in Christchurch, she expanded the scale of her mould making. Standing in a pond at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, Kotuku is a seven metre wide sculpture, a silhouette of the bird repeated three times. To create the work nylon moulds were pumped full of polyurethane foam and fibreglassed after the removal of the fabric. Given a gleaming pearlescent gelcoat, the folded and stitched public sculpture evokes toys or furnishings; its structural bolts resemble a line of buttons. Unlike the bronzy solidity of traditional public statuary these birds are frothy, shiny and hollow.

The native White Heron carries with it ideas of frailty, endangerment and purity, Rothwell’s giant stuffed versions add to this reading questions about our ability to sentimentalise our native fauna. With a lack of cute fuzzy mammals toy manufacturers must play up the charm of our native birds. Loving the avian is a local trait. Rothwell’s latest works have continued to use images of endemic birds: albatross, gull, shag. Ornament-sized casts repeat silhouettes of birds in flight, sewn together. From Jonathan Livingston Seagull to Blue Stratos packaging, the motif of the flying bird represents a cliché of freedom. Hinged together and sprayed with a pearly finish this moment of freedom is fettered, frozen.

…I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in the following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The colour is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
…each breadth stands alone; the bloated curves and flourishes – a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens – go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing sea-weeds in full chase. 2.

The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper is an uncanny classic, the story of a mentally ill woman’s growing fixation with the wallpaper of her sickroom. Forbidden to work, she lies in bed brooding on the walls around her. A suffragette who struggled with mental illness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman endured a treatment similar to that described in her story. Gillman characterizes this enforced domesticity as fostering the very neurosis it aims to cure. As the empty hours pass, the unnamed woman in the story searches desperately for a symmetry in the sprawling convolutions of the paper. Her fascination grows till she finally becomes entwined in the paper’s logic, compulsively circling her room, attempting to evade the clutch of the pattern.

The Yellow Wallpaper combines the intimate power of domestic interiors with the mind’s desire for order and meaning. The smeared and blotted walls of the sickroom become a space for the projection of the protagonist’s neurosis. The threatening images the woman perceives in the vague fungal shapes of her wallpaper mirrors the processes utilized by Rorschach practitioners. Based originally on a parlor game, the Rorschach Test is a projective personality test that attempts to evoke latent states of mind by requiring subjects to find images in ten standardized inkblots. Tracing pathologies that form the most unthreatening phenomena into ominous forms, psychodiagnosticians work with catalogues of images; indexes of ambiguity and ghosts in shadows.

This methodology is familiar to Rothwell. Psychodiagnostics, her bright Rorschach furniture, is a series of beanbags or enormous cushions sewn from shiny tarpaulin. The cushions are patterned after inkblots and are cheerfully coloured and soft, but sticky and cold to the touch. Slip is a series of repulsive ornaments, cast in porcelain, glazed and decorated with pale nail varnish. Formed from condom moulds, lab glass and opium poppy heads, the glistening and demi-tumescent forms resemble glittering piles of entrails. With its jumbled, coagulating ambiguities Slip resembles a porcelain keepsake of the ancient art of augury, the practice of predicting the future from the guts of a slaughtered animal. Drawing portents from forms that might otherwise be repulsive or meaningless, the works echo too the more modern, but equally projective nature of the Rorschach Test.

Vinyl and porcelain, pearl and polish give Rothwell’s work a surface sheen. Behind this, her works linger where the smooth finish of things begins to rupture. Shadows, distortions and ambiguous stains betray the attractions of the point where the polite structure of objects breaks down and something more sinister yet fascinating looms. Innocuous flowers and animals assume enormous proportions. Their anamorphic twist sends us searching for the place where the images cohere, but this point evades us. Birds sprout extra heads, while weeds develop hypnotic candy stripes. Profuse and gargantuan, ornamental and intricate, Rothwell’s world is like a fairy garden where the charming and the grotesque sit down to tea.

If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions – why, that is something like it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper

Notes
1. Vladimir Nabokov
Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle
1970 Penguin Books, Middlesex England
p 81

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
In The Charlotte Perkins Gillman Reader
Edited by Ann J Lane
1981, The Womens Press Limited
London
Pp5-9

3. ibid p 12