Rosemary Laing

weather #9 , 2006
Type C photograph, 3 from an edition of 6
59 x 101.5 cm (image) 83 x 124.5 cm (framed)
signed, dated and inscribed with title and edition number ‘Rosemary Laing/weather #9, 3/6, 2006’ (on the reverse)

SOLD

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Provenance
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2007

Exhibited
Another work from this edition was exhibited in
weather, Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf, 2006
weather, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 2007
weather, Gallerie Lelong, New York, 2007
prostrate your horses – weather and then some – Rosemary Laing at the University of Queensland Art Museum, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 25 September – 15 November 2009

Literature
Another work from this edition is illustrated in
M Helmrich, prostrate your horses – weather and then some – Rosemary Laing, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, illust. p.28
Art and Australia (editors), Current - Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, 2008, illus. p.170

With the weather series, 'the works are executed in a grey palette. A woman appears tossed in a confetti-like spray of newspaper fragments. She occupies a 'no place', a place without geographic feature, a void. Sometimes the figure is assaulted by a deluge of paper fragments, sometimes lightly so, and in one image she is in near darkness. Sequenced across a wall, the sense of dynamism reverberates across space, the figures appearing to somersault and flip from image to image. The artist accentuates their choreography by her attention not only to pose and movement, but also to tonality and chromatic range. We barely catch the words on the paper fragments, their spray more like shrill static. We view a woman who is buffeted by the forces pitched against her and who is unequal to them. As the artist writes, 'This vortex of influence - ambiguously either climatic or events, disables the performer from exerting individual agency. She appears as if her physical actions are now authored by these external forces' (M Helmrich, 'Inclement weather: Rosemary Laing and the performing of disaster', prostrate your horses - weather and then some - Rosemary Laing, University of Queensland Art Museum, exh. cat. p. 16.

Image is courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

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Rosemary Laing was a photo-based artist with a painter’s eye. Her highly detailed, intentional compositions meditated upon humankind’s complicated relationship to the natural environment. The resulting images combined a sublime appreciation of the distinct Australian landscape with highly choreographed human interventions that she integrated within nature in what amounts, in essence, to a transient form of land art.

Born in 1959 in Brisbane, Laing worked and exhibited from the early 1980s until her untimely death in 2024. She trained as a painter in the late-1970s before turning to photography, which was at first just a form of reference material. Laing rose to prominence with her flight research (1999) and bulletproof glass (2002) series of floating brides, images that defy reason in their composition and surreal quality, especially since they were shot without the assistance of digital composition.

In 2017-18, Laing was the subject of a major survey of her work from the last three decades at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria. In 2015, two of her photographic series – greenwork (1995) and brownwork (1996-97) – were shown in full in Rosemary Laing: transportation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. An earlier major survey, the unquiet landscapes of rosemary laing, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2005, touring in 2006 to Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark. Her work has been included in multiple biennials, including the Biennale of Sydney (2008); the Venice Biennale (2007); the Busan Biennale (2004); and the Istanbul Biennale (1995).

In 2019, Laing received the Overseas Photographer Award at the 35th Higashikawa Awards, Hokkaido, Japan, in career recognition of photographic achievements such as weather (2006); leak (2010) and buddens (2017). A monograph on Laing’s work was published by Prestel, New York, in 2012, written by Abigail Solomon-Godeau.