Before I packed up my life and moved to New York a few months ago, I spent a day at a sprawling landfill on the outskirts of Sydney, shedding the parts of my life that wouldn’t be making the trip with me.
It felt like stepping into a dystopian future, mounds of rubbish, three or four stories high, rising by the second as thick bulldozer arms swung overhead, dumping trash upon trash upon trash. The ugly side of human consumption hit me like it never had before. I couldn’t help but think that the more we consume, the closer we get to a day when there’s simply nowhere left to put it all.
Los Angeles-based artist Rosie Clements’ latest work touches on this subject with a vivacious, saucy twist. Utilising the relatively new method of UV printing, which uses ultraviolet light to dry inks as they’re applied to a range of surfaces such as paper, plastic, glass and wood. Originally, this process was only used to bond gel polish to fingernails.
Strikingly, Rosie’s material of choice is bubble wrap, onto which she prints sexy, summery photographs across its bumpy surface. Each work becomes a symbol of desire, consumption, and ephemerality — a study on how we package beauty, commodify experience, and absorb the endless stream of visual stimulation that defines the digital age.
Because bubble wrap distorts whatever it covers, Rosie asks the viewer to slow down and engage with intention. Each image must be approached at the right angle and from the right distance to reveal what lies within.
The more I delve into creators from across the globe, the more I discover how powerful and formative point-and-shoot cameras were for Gen X’ers. Rosie Clements is yet another. “My dad bought it to take family photos, and I quickly became obsessed with it. That feeling of turning something ephemeral into an object you could hold. That’s still so satisfying to me.”
On a deeper level, Rosie speaks about the values her parents instilled in her that continue to inform her approach to creating. After finding out their daughter wanted to pursue art full-time, they were concerned yet supportive, and it was in this tension that Rosie found value.
“Their utilitarian spirit taught me that creative work doesn’t exist in a vacuum; you need discipline to sustain it. I learnt to grow my creative practice slowly, rather than expecting immediate success.”
It definitely wasn’t a linear path to artistry. For many years prior, Rosie bounced around, travelling and taking odd jobs wherever she went.
“I wound up working on a trail crew in Alaska, building hiking trails in the national parks and spent a summer working on a peach farm…it’s such a gratifying feeling to build something concrete, and so calming to live and work in nature all the time.”
Experimentation and play gave rise to this most recent series. While touring the facilities on her first day of grad school, Rosie came face to face with a UV printer. By day two, she was printing on anything she could get her hands on, with early attempts falling flat. “A few days later, I found bubble wrap on the sidewalk and something clicked.”
The fact that it’s even possible to print on a surface as fragile as bubble wrap feels kind of miraculous. Before you’ve even spent time with Rosie’s images, there’s already a hum of wonder…how did these things come into being at all?
Looking at her work takes me back to old party memories, moments where I’m soaked from a nearby swimming pool and rather drunk. I can hear the cackle of laughter and the slap of someone breaking the water’s surface. There’s also this sense of everlastingness, childhood summers come rushing back: zero responsibilities, the feeling that the holidays would stretch on forever. As warm as these memories are, they’re murky, and I love how the bubble wrap gives that feeling a physical form – faded, warped, yet still full of joy.
Rosie reminds me that bubble wrap carries an inherently childlike quality, which might explain why my mind keeps drifting back to that period. “Every kid wants to reach out and pop the bubbles any chance they get.” On a deeper level, though, Rosie is speaking to fragmentation and desire. The images are beautiful and tantalising, yet always mediated by this disposable plastic coating. We’re a species obsessed with wanting what we can’t have, especially when it comes to sex and intimacy. Sit with these images long enough, and you’ll feel the impulse to peel back the veil, to reveal them in all their raunchy glory.
“Bodies in water, skin in sunlight, intimate moments– there’s a longing for physical contact that comes through (I hope), a yearning for unmediated connection”.
The artworks speak to our beastly consumer cycle and our endless thirst for dopamine hits. Think about it: we order things online incessantly, eyes lighting up the moment the packages land. We mindlessly doomscroll Instagram, a reel of perfect bodies bathed in perfect light. We want to be these people, to have what they have. However, the second we unbox our parcel and refresh our social media feeds, the cycle starts again.
A running thread across Rosie’s work is her use of vibrant, almost rave-like colour. So it’s no surprise to learn she’s captivated by raving and club culture. Beyond that, Rosie actively contributes to the scene as a DJ and music producer, very much embedded in Los Angeles’ dance underground.
Many of the scenes captured in her work were shot in the thick of the fete. One party, however, surfaces again and again: Sustain Release.
Tucked away in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, this small-scale festival has built quite a reputation. It’s a party that prides itself on intimacy and community—so much so that tickets aren’t available to the general public. Instead, past attendees are invited back and given the chance to bring a new guest, effectively vouching for them as a good fit. Those newcomers then gain membership status, earning the right to invite someone of their own the following year. An insular, Russian doll–like system.
What’s more, the organisers have impeccable taste, consistently booking some of the world’s most sought-after acts. The 2025 edition, which marked the congregation’s 11th year, featured Ben UFO, Maara, OK Williams, Reptant, Vlada, Loidis, and more.
“The cowboy I met at Sustain Release. The kiss on the grass was shot there as well. A really sweet couple that I’ve photographed two years in a row now. The poolside shots were taken at a friend’s bachelorette party in Topanga Canyon”
The hunky cowboy is just one of many portraits. These frames, in particular, spark a deeper curiosity in me, each subject’s face blurred by the bubble wrap. I find myself wishing I could wave a wand and unsmudge their features. In other portraits, this urge intensifies, as hands obscure faces and eyes remain sealed shut. When questioned about the volume of portraits, Rosie tells me she’s spent a lot of time pondering identity lately.
“How much of ourselves exists online versus IRL? The line between reality and digital space is thinner than ever, and that’s not inherently a bad thing, but it does scare me.”
Outside of hot ‘n’ heavy party occasions and sun-kissed skin, Rosie also turns her lens towards nature. There’s something jarring in seeing lush landscapes printed directly onto plastic, a disposable material. The tension is powerful: plants and flowers, so essential to the health of the planet and everything on it, set against a material that clogs landfills and takes decades to degrade.
Rosie shares that she’s often thinking about the impact we have on the Earth. In her hometown of Los Angeles, the contrast between natural beauty and human infrastructure is so striking that it’s no surprise these feelings blossomed in her mind—corkscrew highway overpasses against the beauty of Runyon Canyon or Topanga State Park. The artist isn’t necessarily trying to point fingers; rather, she uses these scenes as symbols of a different kind of desire, not for other people, but for what she calls “something bigger and more enduring.”
These works have turned major heads, with Thunderhead (seen below) handpicked by The New York Times for the cover of a Sunday Opinion edition. Sweetly, I stumbled across a comment the artist left on their Instagram at the time that read “yung Rosie would be blown away” — an obvious career highlight.
The few prints in this vein are potent. Thunderhead is captured at dusk, overlooking a calming sunset vista. The use of flash is an interesting choice, but it pays off. Illuminated fronds form a frame within a frame, guiding the eye to an orange orb sinking toward the sea. While Garden Party is a smear of platinum-blue sky, foliage, and pink blossom stretched across the canvas, a blur of the great outdoors. Yet once again, these elements are shielded by their arch-nemesis… plastic. It’s uncomfortable, but undeniably alluring.
The power of Rosie Clements ‘ work lies in its tension: the tug-of-war between the fleeting and the permanent, the natural and the artificial, desire and distance. Her bubble-wrap images remind us that much of our world is mediated by screens, plastic and expectation. Yet within that mediation, there is still beauty, memory and connection. We are drawn in not only by the lustrous colours and exposed flesh, but by the human truths peeking through: the longing, the desire, the imperfect, ephemeral moments that make life tangible – beads of water on tanned bum, the svelte texture of a flower petal, the locked lips of a couple in love, times deep in the rave that seem to good to be true when everyone is flooded with euphoria.
These pieces ask us to reckon with what we value, what we discard, and what we crave. Though our lives stand on stilts made of urges and excess, Rosie’s art reminds us that a sense of wonder will always remain – a glow set against the shadows cast by growing piles of discarded things.
