Up in the air and down on the ground Rosemary Laing, 1959-2024

Rosemary Laing’s work sits at the nexus of contemporary Australian identity. Contested land and custodianship of place inform her epic and disturbing images and objects. Highly constructed and performed, her imaginary terrains strive to reconcile elements of beauty and wonder with our impulse to destroy and disregard the natural world.

“She is after all not a nature photographer but the photographer of a predicament . . .”
Douglas Kahn, Photofile, 1995

I am listening to Rosemary Laing play on the Steinway piano in the Boyd family sitting room at Bundanon where she was in residence. She recorded herself playing as an accompaniment to her otherwise silent isolation, while severe flooding held her captive and transformed the work she was in the middle of producing from one thing into another. You can hear the rain like a second soundtrack to her elegiac Piano Music. Her composition and performance are very confident for someone without any musical background.

Born in Brisbane, Rosemary Laing trained as a painter, subsequently studying photography in Tasmania and Sydney. Her early work interrogated the margins of perception between the analogue and the digital at a time when art discourse was awash with discussion about the merits and demerits of emerging technologies and the camera’s historical burden—its singular, colonial, patriarchal gaze.

In 1995 Rosemary shared with me a photograph of a figure, standing on an airport runway, viewing a hovering shape. It was a soft lozenge—a kind of unidentified flying object. The image, and the others in the series, were disquieting. Even thirty years ago images like this could be created digitally; however, Rosemary explained that she had spent an inordinate amount of time making the photographs with a large-plate camera, a nineteenth century invention. I was astonished. Why do something so difficult when it could be achieved otherwise?

The time-lapse pieces (greenwork TL Series, 1995) reconcile two speeds—that of the aircraft and that of the camera—producing an image where the plane appears to hover mid-air, a kind of simultaneous acceleration and deceleration. In other work the human body, through the lens of the camera, speeds through a landscape which dissolves into pixilation and becomes abstract. These works stand for a conundrum, a question about our own materiality and subjectivity, in a world where technology seemed to render us disembodied and potentially annihilated. This series of works were often linked with the philosophical propositions of writers such as Paul Virilio, whose ideas of technology, speed, and aesthetics coincided with the rapidly changing digital terrain, and the semiotician Félix Guattari, where the exploration of subjectivity was central.

Throughout her career Laing worked in and with the landscape, utilising its scale, and disrupting its familiar spaces with performative and material interventions. However, her increasing despair at the failure of climate policy, and the lack of recognition for the careful custodianship of the Australian landscape by First Nations people, drew her to reflect upon the colonised landscape and representations of destruction and renewal. Her work was characterised by a luminous and seductive beauty, rich in colour and rendered with the cinematographer’s attention to mise en scene. flight research, 1999-2000, possibly still Laing’s most recognised series, opened the door to international biennales and wide art world acclaim. In the work the figure of a bride floats in the sky above the terrain of the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. However, in the bullet proof glass series, 2002, the bride twists and turns, surrounded by startled birds, her dashed hopes represented by bloodied bullet holes. The latter series echoes Laing’s frustration at the failure of the 1999 Australian republic referendum.

Each new body of work contained elements of the extraordinary, and the unsettling. Axminster carpet, luxuriant and insidious, covers the floor of remnant rain forest on the South Coast (groundspeed, 2001); the frame of a full-scale suburban home is upended in the bush, a “home” intruding on the landscape and tossed about by a flood, (leak, 2010); and a torrent of discarded red clothing flows where the river meets the sea at Wreck Bay, an Aboriginal community and the place of many ship wrecks and rescues (Buddens, 2017). In the series half a dozen poems for recent times, 2021, arrangements of native flowers incorporate burnt twigs with tiny, healing, splints holding their fragile breaks together, referencing the catastrophic bush fires of 2019-20.

“A ‘swansong’ is a metaphor for an action or a performance prior to an ending. The term conveys the notion of something both grand and final,” wrote Victoria Lynn in early 2024. Since 1998, Swanhaven, on the south coast of NSW, has been the second home of Rosemary Laing and her partner, artist, Geoff Kleem. It houses her large collection of shells from which she has engaged in a kind of “shellwork,” creating small sculptures. In the exhibition swansongs, 2024, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, these assembled pieces were placed on shelves, some close to the floor, and shown alongside large-scale photographs of the miniature sculptures. Broken, repaired, and somewhat comical, these “creatures” have tiny bandages and Blu Tacked appendages. Some pieces appear to be in small family groups, and like survivors or climate change refugees, seem to be moving slowly to higher ground. There is despair, but there is always hope on show.

When Laing came to Bundanon in 2014 to make The Paper she worked with the precision of a one-person motion picture crew—director, DOP [director of photography], and producer all in one. Tonnes of newsprint were deposited onto the forest floor, the entire ground covered with the last vestiges of the Murdoch and Packer media empires, with their daily stock market tallies and strident editorials. The night before the shoot the floodwater swept over the carefully prepared, papered landscape. The original concept was destroyed, but Laing decided the work would now speak of the impossibility of even the powerful to withstand extreme environmental impacts, and of the indifference of the mainstream media to the climate crisis. The Paper is hauntingly beautiful. The flood-washed paper moulded to the ground appears fragile and pale, its faded messages and smiling faces obliterated by a force of nature. In the work the perfection of the bush is ever present, through the stream of human detritus—so much waste, so much babble.

Laing’s work is a plea for us to notice, to care, and to take responsibility for the wonder that surrounds us. Vale Rosemary. And thank you.

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 69, 2024. 
Images courtesy of the estate of Rosemary Laing and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne