Caroline Rothwell is an artist whose most visible work in the City of Sydney is ‘Youngsters’: two life size bronze sculptures in Barrack St in central Sydney. In this interview Caroline talks about her early life, her development as an artist, and the wide variety of materials and formats she has used in her artistic practice. In the excerpt below she discusses the positive public reaction to ‘Youngsters’.
I wasn’t sure how people would react but I’ve never had such an amazing response to the work. People have really loved it, and they’ve really embraced it. I think the scale, because there’s nothing intimidating about the scale, they kind of feel like these little moments of silence because they’re so human but they’re so still and they’re so small that they feel quite vulnerable. And they’re on George Street [in central Sydney], they’re just on the corner of George and Barrack Street. And there’s a fruit-seller who’s right next to one of them, and he gets there really early in the morning and he was telling me a story. So it was a guy in his truck who’d just done some piping work in the street and he was having his breakfast about 5.00am. And he said he saw him stop – kind of mid-bite – and he was just staring at this little person, and then he just put his sandwich down, got out of the truck and ran to this sculpture because he thought it was this little lost person just standing in the street. And there’s been a really positive reaction to it …
