Like the mythical clay relief and Duchamp’s mid-twentieth century plaster mould, Rothwell’s shadow self-portraits are occult objects, supernatural talismans that guard against loss and which keep memory alive. The English language title of Duchamp’s portrait, With My Tongue in My Cheek, suggests an ironic reading of the work, which was produced towards the end of his life as he withdrew from the world while being pursued by the demi-mondaine, a fugitive from the cult of personality- With My Tongue in My Cheek is a message from the not-yet-dead, a pre-post-humous relic of the aging artist. It refers to the late 19th century vogue for mysterious facial impressions cast in wet plaster which mediums were claiming to have received as talismans from the spirit world in seances. In Duchamp’s work, a plaster cast of his cheek and jaw is affixed to a line drawing of his profile. Two millennia later, Marcel Duchamp’s self-portrait Quand on ne rit pas à se décrocher la mâchoire (1959) may have borne more than a passing resemblance to the shadowy head of the potter’s daughter’s lover. ![]() Her father, a potter from Corinth, filled in the outline with clay and modelled the man’s features in relief so that his daughter would have a likeness to remember her lover by. In his Natural History of the world, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described the first work of art, which he attributed to a Greek woman who drew the silhouette of her departing lover by tracing the shadow of his head cast by candlelight on the wall. It is this spectre of an alter ego-the dark possibility of an alternative self shadowing one’s ‘real’ life-that haunts Rothwell’s recent work.Ī digression: there is a historical, or at least mythological, precedent for Rothwell’s solid shadows. Subject to the laws of the natural world and yet somehow supernatural in its manifestation as an analogue of the self, the shadow is at once familiar and ungraspable, an uncanny image. A shadow is a projection of oneself into another realm. It’s impossible, of course, to draw one’s own shadow, let alone to cast it and render it as a solid form, but there remains something extraordinarily emotionally compelling in the idea that perhaps one could-and as if by analyzing the resultant form, one could approach a new method of character divination, a kind of psychomancy in three dimensions. ![]() Roughly figure-shaped and of human scale, these pink pearlescent fibreglass works purported to be casts of the artist’s own shadow. ![]() It first appeared three years with a disconcerting literality in an installation of three sculptures ( Shadows, 1999). Shadows are not part of the real world, but the appearance of a shadow testifies to the solidity of an object, for what casts a shadow must be real.īut there is one thing which the severest and mildest cases all have in common, and which is equally found in parapraxes and chance actions: the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material, which, although pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for expressing itself.įor some time now, a shadow has been abroad in Caroline Rothwell’s work. Ink Blot Test A consideration of Caroline Rothwell’s recent work
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