Left: Joan Ross. Photo: Cara Odowd. Right: Caroline Rothwell. Photo: Anna Kucera. Courtesy: the artists and Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery, Bowral.

Ross & Rothwell: in the same boat is the gallery’s annual ‘Paired Artists’ exhibition and broadly considers the practices of Australian artists, Joan Ross and Caroline Rothwell.

The selection of artworks presented explores the disjunction between colonisation and nature and the fraught legacy that we’re left with stands out. Both Ross and Rothwell reference colonial artists and botanists to give voice to the urgent matters of our time through humorous and intelligent critics of these historical accounts. While their works contemporise history, they also reveal the impacts and consequences of our existence, encouraging us to consider the legacy we’re destined to leave if left without action.

The Southern Highlands’ grand estates and rolling European-style gardens make Ngununggula an exciting location to interrogate these themes. Curated gardens reflect social and aesthetic values. In creating, maintaining, and interpreting gardens, people construe and construct a relationship with their environment. Gardening, livestock management and manipulating our natural world were acts of settlement and a statement of possession for the colonisers, with memories of ‘home’ often selective and idealised.