Joan Ross and Caroline Rothwell were both born in the United Kingdom, but these days live in Sydney on Gadigal Country. With UK pedigrees and largely Antipodean adulthoods, both artists could be described as being ‘in the same boat’. In addition to being fastened to their shared British and Antipodean anchors, this ‘boat’ is propelled by their critical and conceptual enquiry, by rampant material experimentation, and by humour. In other words, Ross and Rothwell share a keen awareness of the narratives and impacts of colonisation, translating such awareness into works of art that are materially inventive and often underpinned by sharp wit and a subversive sense of ‘play’.
For Joan Ross, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture and the moving image are all part of her armoury. Her signature use of hi-vis colour points to the dangerous nature of her work. She deserves danger money! With years spent disrupting colonial chronicles and subverting dominant histories, Ross is now a seasoned saboteur. In the moving image work I give you a mountain, she animates a drawing of the Holophusikon (Sir Ashton Lever’s natural history museum) by eighteenth-century British artist Sarah Stone. Ross floods the museum, covering its walls with moss and stranding its specimens, with
the neon deluge triggering associations with recent climate-change-driven events.
We encounter conches and corals in cabinets and birds in bell jars – many collected
on James Cook’s voyages. We then leave the museum and enter a pseudo-alpine environment where one man offers another a mountain, before the landscape dissolves, leaving nothing but the men’s heads on the ground and an omnipresent surveillance camera. Is it Cook, or Lever, who crumble before the credits? While the collectors are colonised by their own curiosity, it is birdsong – the soundtrack of 60 million years – that remains in this cautionary tale.
Ross alerts us to the dangers of our time in history, but she wants to keep us safe too. In Northern Territory the red velvet of the classic crowd barrier is replaced with simulated roo tail. In this succinct and perverse reversal, the local – signified by the kangaroo
fur – inverts the standard ‘keep out’ message employed by colonisers, reminding us that we are always on Aboriginal land. This blow lands with aplomb on the glass jaw of the Southern Highlands, where pastoralism and stately homes attempt an annulment
of First Nations presence. When asked about her practice Ross has stated, ‘one of
the reasons that I make the work that I do, is that I don’t think you can be anywhere in Australia and not be aware that we’re on Indigenous land. And I can only too clearly see the colonial influence, and the disjunction between that and nature’.
This disjunction between nature and colonial invasion is the very subject of Ross’s M’lady’s Ikebana. A fluoro-adorned young woman, identifiable as the Honourable Mrs Graham from a 1777 painting of the same name by British artist Thomas Gainsborough, is busily engaged in the art of ikebana. Her formal arrangements feature native trees and Aboriginal people borrowed from a John Glover painting. The bucolic pageantry of Glover’s paintings, in which Aboriginal people revel on their homelands, is supplanted by reality – the ‘uprooting’ effects of invasion where people and plants are violently controlled.
The conceptual and material concerns of Caroline Rothwell are just as prolific, political and promiscuous as those in play by Joan Ross. The daughter of an industrial chemist, Rothwell’s early experiments include pouring lead alloy into shapes sewn in household linen over a domestic bathtub. In this exhibition Rothwell exhibits sculptures and installations made using a casting material called Hydrostone, a shift from the aptly named alloy Britannia metal used in her earlier work. These new sculptures, in their seemingly infinite inflorescence, point to an alternative florilegium and arboretum, one in which plants often conjoined with human follies are harbingers of our interference in nature and signs of our colonisation of the climate.
Almost a decade ago, Rothwell returned to the UK for a residency at the University of Cambridge. There in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, she viewed the original copper plate engravings from Joseph Banks’s Florilegium, his anthology of Antipodean botany collected during Cook’s Pacific voyages. Systematically gathering thousands of specimens with a kleptomania akin to Lever’s, Banks took plants from Kamay/Botany Bay, the site of first contact between the British and the traditional owners of the Dharawal nation. Rothwell has subtly doctored the plants in Banks’s Florilegium. In this act of guerrilla grafting, she cuts through Banks’s finely rendered illustrations with a scalpel blade, inserting watercolour tongues curling around blossoms and leaves as though part of the original plant. As Rothwell says, ‘the tongues look quite snake-like and consuming. I like the double edge of these perfect prints and these
quite abject forms; they grow into something else’. This ‘something else’ includes the cast sculptures and cut collages which have, in turn, grown into large paintings on birch panel featuring the impressions of hand-cut PVC drawings. This material miscegenation – where one thing grows into another – is seen in a work such as Sapling, a title that gestures to the fronding forms of the central plant-like shape but also to the new growth wrought by experimentation. Alongside the painting hangs the plasticised skin of the PVC drawing used as the printing plate in Sapling. Fluid, weighty and hung in a manner akin to a trophied animal pelt, this body is nonetheless more laboratory than landscape.
Like Ross in her recalibration of Sarah Stone’s work, Rothwell also subverts the often- gendered practice of botanical illustration. By carefully collecting emissions from car exhaust pipes to use as both a botanical drawing material and as the source imagery for the moving image, Rothwell speaks to the pernicious nature of our daily, domestic lives. Recently, Rothwell’s four-dimensional practice has included a collaboration with Google Creative Labs on Infinite Herbarium, an app-based archive of futuristic hybrid plants derived from images contained within the open-source Biodiversity Heritage Library. In contrast to the delicate botanicals of Banks’s Florilegium, the specimens
in Infinite Herbarium are projected at human scale, their undulating forms taking on the appearance of lungs, hearts and limbs. As Rothwell states, ‘at such a huge scale, the plants become very bodily. I want these forms to be bigger than us so it’s not us imposing, it’s them imposing on us’.
Ross and Rothwell both summon us to face history. In referencing an archive of historic and colonial imagery, they remind us that ‘the future of the past is contingent and unstable’, to borrow the words of cultural theorist Homi Bhabha. In doing so, they also enliven us to our own agency in the perilous present.
