Slamina at Maddox Arts

Slamina at Maddox Arts

23 September, 2009
by: Katuschka

Forget plastic surgery, make-up - even clothes - the hottest new look is quite literally about getting under your skin. With plastinated corpses bumping (literal) uglies at the Body Worlds exhibition and much lauded anatomical models exhibited at the Wellcome Museum in London, and similar shows in Japan, Italy and Mexico; spilling your guts and venting your spleen has never been quite so hip.

Of course, the illicit relationship between art and dead bodies is a longstanding and mutually beneficial one, artists get an accurate look at the landscape of the human body without all that pesky breathing to ruin a masterpiece, and the muse, more or less, gets immortalised from beyond the grave, or shoved in a cupboard – que sera sera. If this is all a little grim for your constitution, Slamina at Maddox Arts offers a slightly more delicate and less visceral take on this current trend, with intricate, silver, anatomical sculptures arranged in shadow-play tableaux.

Caroline Rothwell's sculptures are creatures with human bodies, topped with animal skulls. Straight out of a spicy primordial soup of Boschian hell, cheap toys, weeds and shadow puppetry, Rothwell's pieces show nature at its most fertile and debauched as deer and birds rut with strands of DNA and human features are obliterated like some horrible abomination of God that's actually not all bad. A fine-art melding of The Island of Dr Moreaux and Dungeons and Dragons, with a hefty dose of theatre; even the name ('animals' spelt backwards – one of the lamest palindromic attempt ever) denotes the natural order being twisted and evolved. The show alternately comments on the murky period of pre-hominin evolution and the environmentally stunted times we live in today.

In themselves, the sculptures are curious but underwhelming, but when placed together with a dystopian breeze-block landscape and sharp lighting the gallery is transformed into an atmospheric Platonic cave of the macabre. The backgrounds Rothwell has created to frame her little freaks - ink drawings of dusk-elongated forests and PVC cloths scored into distended shadows – demonstrate a blindingly effective use of plain materials and show nature itself reaching out with malevolent fingers. Slamina won't necessarily give you the rubbernecking thrill the syphilitic heads at the Wellcome will, but it will give you a glimpse into a tiny shadowscape where things have gone just a little bit wrong.

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Katuschka