Exhibitions: Caroline Rothwell | Newell Harry

What if we could remember the future?

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present What if we could remember the future? an exhibition of new works by Caroline Rothwell.

With a range of mixed-media wall works and sculptures, What if we could remember the future? considers the present and past as a way to reconcile the future. Recalling arranging practices of cabinets of curiosities from the 16th-century and collecting systems, Rothwell challenges us to consider the interconnected relationship between humans and nature through the lens of trade, collection and colonisation. Shrouded in layered interwoven materials, a 19th-century Victorian glasshouse provides a web-like portal through which we can view history. The spaces and gaps within the structure allow absence to become presence; as a reflection of the unseen offers divergent narratives and ways to record our past. The concept of a structure to contain and hold the past draws attention to what is not contained or recorded. It becomes a mirror for reassessing the inability to retain and record all histories.

Small (oldish) works on paper

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present Small (oldish) works on paper, an exhibition by Newell Harry.

In this important collection of historic drawings spanning from 2002 - 2016, we are allowed into the artist's inner workings - a view into intimate precursors to major installations where ideas, studies and preparatory sketches form a suite of beautifully textured and layered works on paper. In these snapshots of fragmentary archives and assemblages, 20 years of practice has been gathered and curated into a small selection of ink and pencil drawings and monoprints on paper that engage a broad, yet sustained, variety of media the artist has gravitated to over time. 

What’s on the label is exactly what’s in the tin: thirty-odd, small, oldish works on paper, roughly chosen across two periods between 2004-6 to 2015-16, and never conceived with the purposes of exhibition in mind. But here we are in post-ish Covid 2023 with a small show of small works on paper presented in RO9’s aptly fitting ‘small room’. A lesser known element of my practice, drawing has always been and remains an integral act within my process. Like threads around a maypole these small artifacts often circulate and accrue syncretically over large swathes of time, and in that circularity are often abandoned and returned to. A process whereby things slip in and out of focus; where layers and sediments are built up and razed intermittently; and words, gestures, forms and figures are added or erased months, years or decades later. While some contain the seeds of gestation that have led elsewhere, mostly they are simply done for their own sake and the immediacy and freedom that drawing permits me to explore over more physically (and conceptually) demanding aspects of my work, particularly with installation. – Newell Harry, 2023