Defunct Tyger I of Exotopos

This is a maquette for a large-scale bronze piece commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society; it is part of the Tasmanian Tiger series that is based on the Thylacine Cynocephalus, an extinct species who's last member died in captivity in 1936. Current scientific ventures have led to the reproduction of Thylacine cartilage by injecting mice with Thylacine DNA. This real-life, genetically engineered concoction of mouse and Tasmanian tiger is the factual subject of interest in Rothwell's world, in other words, her reference to the present and real. Working from Victorian drawings and colonial representations of the Tyger, the depicted form is linked with the past. As a result of man's tendency to embellish and imaginatively represent historical sources, Rothwell gives us a somewhat mythologized form of the thylacine specimine. Rothwell's creations are strangely twisted mutations. The solidified seams and patchwork fabrication- imprints from the unique fabrication process of pouring metal into fabric moulds- lend these Tygers a Frankenstein-like quality, as if they have been crafted back into existence from extinction. Their absurdity, however, brings us back to the present to contemplate the incongruity of recreating, in our very real scientific world, the Tasmanian Tiger from a mouse.

A world that echoes the reality we know; a world with roots in the empirical realm of science and history yet is simultaneously bizarre. This is the surreal landscape in which Rothwell's sculptural creations are conceived. There is a rational grounding to these imaginative conceptions evident in the work's interest in current scientific research as well as in its reference to Darwin's 'Tree of Life'. However, there is also an absurdity about these creatures, with elements of hyper-breeding and merger of past and present, that pushes it into the realm of fantasy; Rothwell's pieces belong to a world that is outside of our own, as Aristotle described, a world 'exo topos'.