While the evidentiary basis of science is the starting point for much of Rothwell’s work, there is a poetic quality to her practice which communicates in another equally powerful register. Take the major sculpture she has produced for The National, for example. It looks like a tree suspended upside down, or alternatively its root systems, spreading out under the earth in an invisible mirror of the branches above. But it’s a representation of human lungs, with the thorax and bronchi taking the place of the trunk and boughs. Trees, of course, are the lungs of the world, taking in carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen. Rothwell’s sculpture reminds us – with poetic simplicity – of the reciprocal relationship between our own existence and the lives of trees on earth. ‘For me, representation of landscape is political,’ says Rothwell. ‘Landscape is political.’

The three animations commissioned for The National 2021 are painted with lamp black, or soot – the residue from fossil fuel emissions, mixed with a binding agent. Rothwell scrapes the soot from car exhaust pipes; she’s found that different cars produce different colours, depending on the efficiency of the engine and the rustiness of the pipe. She mixes the local emissions with others sent to her from the industrial smokestacks of Philadelphia, as well as soot from the 2019 New South Wales bushfires – climate change doesn’t respect national borders, and we are all in it together. In her animations, literally conjured forth from smoke, a tree grows inside a bare room, glimpsed through an aperture which emits tendrils of gas along with free-floating numbers denoting measurement. In another, curlicues of smoke billow forth from rococo-styled fretwork – pointing to the period of history from which human emissions of carbon dioxide began to be measurable. (Lara Strongman, 2021)

Curated by Rachel Kent 

Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition information