Rosemary Laing

eddie , 2010
Type C photograph, 1 from an edition of 6
59 x 139.5 cm (image) 83 x 163.5 cm (framed)
signed, dated and inscribed with title and edition number ‘Rosemary Laing/Eddie 1/6 2010’ (on the reverse)

SOLD

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Provenance
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2011

Exhibited
Another work from this edition was exhibited in
leak, Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf, 2011
leak, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 2011
leak, Gallerie Lelong, New York, 2012

Literature
Another example from this edition is illustrated in
A. Solomon-Godeau, Rosemary Laing, Piper Press, Sydney, 2012, illus. p.168-169

Another work from this edition is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

'Continuing her investigation of made environments, Rosemary Laing’s series leak 2010 is a densely metaphorical yet acutely readable parable. eddie, like each image in the series of five, depicts a skeleton of house that has landed on the side of a mound in the pastoral landscape of the Cooma-Monaro district of New South Wales. Or, quite possibly, it has grown out of it like a tumour that is about to spread and destroy this ostensibly idyllic setting - once an inspiration for painters George Lambert, Hilda Rix Nicholas and photographer David Moore. Laing’s photographs have often explicitly referred to colonial responses to the Australian land, most notably in the series groundspeed 2001 and one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape 2003. However, if these earlier works focused on the incongruous attempts of settler culture to blend in with the land, the very opposite occurs in eddie. Here, the landscape is subjugated and on the verge of a destructive metamorphosis. Laing depicts this dramatic condition by highlighting the violent clash of the romantic forms of the tree and mound with the anachronistically rigid, geometric shapes of the timber frame.Forgoing digital manipulation the photographer wills this surreal spill-over into being by constructing the actual house frame (in 1.8:1 scale), thus bringing the allegory uncomfortably close to the fabric of reality. Furthermore, the suburban house, which has been the cornerstone of the Australian dream, is literally turned upside down as the photograph can be shown either way - upturning the house or the landscape.This confusion of the phenomenological relationships is the photographer’s way of questioning whether a balancing act between nature and humanity is a possibility or a perpetual predicament. Laing has analysed the various aspects of this quandary within the Australian context since her 1995 series greenwork. (https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/240.2011/)

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.