Caroline Rothwell, Weather Maker, 2014

At a distance, the images and their materials seem familiar motifs of industrial modernism: smoke stacks, cannons, airships… The materials, as well, are at first sight reassuringly frank: bronze, rubber, paper, ink… On a second take, there is something clearly wrong here. The cannons emit only billowing smoke. The zeppelins remain tethered to strange moorings. The clouds, at first sight all silver lining, emit their rain vertically upwards, and their rain is black… The subject of these works is technology, but speculative contemporary technology rather than steam punk. What is documented here is a nascent industry: weather modification and climate control… Rothwell’s work makes it impossible to ever look at Duchamp’s the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even in the same way—all of a sudden Duchamp’s masterpiece of sexual innuendo becomes retrospectively transformed into a giant weather station, a hot and heavy harbinger of the anthropocene.

text by Adam Jasper Weather Maker, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Rothwell_Weather Maker
Rothwell_Weather Maker
Caroline Rothwell, Weather Maker
Caroline Rothwell, Weather Maker
Rothwell_Composition 1
Rothwell_Climate Machines
Rothwell_Climate Machine