Caroline Rothwell: Grants and Residencies

As part of the 2014 Adelaide Biennale Dark Heart exhibition, Rothwell presented an installation consisting of four large sculptural wall pieces each composed of images cut by hand with a scalpel out of black PVC. The sliced out material remained attached, cascading from each of the panels, giving the impression of an image at once forming and coming undone. Titled Climatic, these dark, evocations of toxic congestion were paired with a series of cast metal, sci-fi-esque but apparently plausible machines: cloud busters, cloud seeders and artificial trees. Grouped together like a technological arsenal, these mechanical contraptions seem ready to combat the advance of climate change.

The OMI Residency offered Rothwell the opportunity to expand this confronting yet conceptually elegant body of work to further explore what she sees as “man’s yearning to predict, control and mechanise the future”. During the month she produced a suite of works on paper representing climate machines, smoke stacks and architectural forms emblematic of 19th century industrialism. The structures depicted are rendered in copper leaf that is almost subsumed by clouds painted in a black pigment produced by mixing emissions collected from car exhausts with a binder medium. Rothwell also made a series of silvery cloud sculptures cut from PVC and coated with aluminum leaf. These gleaming artisanal forms have a swirling baroque quality and sense of preciousness that contrasts with the clouds in the images on paper.