Caroline Rothwell, Falling Suspended, 2017
Rothwell continues her critique of our attempts to colonise, tame and control nature… three spindly bronze sculptures resemble scientific retort stands but also winter trees, bereft of foliage… In the tallest of the Retort sculptures, a storm glass is balanced on its opposite side by a marine weather vane… this delicately balanced Giacometti-like sculpture with a magnifying glass for a head, proposes – with Rothwell’s typically wry and nuanced understatement – that the colonising imperative of recent centuries is today replaced by a compulsion to gain mastery over nature and the climate itself, as if we have the power to avert the imminent and inevitable ecological catastrophe that defines the Anthropocene.
The #rothwellofficeplants are based on Instagram photos of office plants posted from around the world… the plants are similar to each other and familiar to us all: specimens of palm and Monstera native to tropical climates and once considered exotic, but in the Modern era have become the go-to plant for office buildings globally. Rothwell reanimates these often drab and dusty indoor plants by fleshing them out, literally giving them body that’s contained within a tactile skin of hand-sewn metal leaf….
- Falling Suspended Text by Felicity Fenner