Rosemary Laing

weather #16, 2006-2007/2009
four-colour colour-separation photolithograph on paper with hand colouring by Rosemary Laing in August 2009
42 x 68 cm (image); 63 x 89.5 cm (paper); 67.5 x 94.5 cm (frame)
signed, dated and inscribed 'Rosemary Laing/weather #16 8/30/2006-2007/2009/handcoloured by RL/August 2009’ (on the reverse); number 8 from an edition of 30

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Provenance
The artist
Gifted from the above to the present owner

Exhibited
prostrate your horses - weather and then some - Rosemary Laing at the University of Queensland Art Museum, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 25 September - 15 November 2009 (another from the edition)

Of the whole series weather, Michelle Helmrich writes "For the most part, 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 figure 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"....

The weather series was produced at a time when global warming was catching the world headlines. Authorities argued the link between extreme weather events and global warming and issued warnings of dire consequences, be they rising sea levels or increasingly devastating bush fires, cyclones, tornadoes and floods. But beyond the storms that raged on land and sea, storms also raged in the political sphere....

While far too literal to ascribe such global crises to the 'meaning' of Laing's weather series, it is perhaps not too long a bow to suggest that these debates can inform, at least in part, our understanding of these works. (Michelle Helmrich, 'Inclement weather: Rosemary Laing and the performing of disaster', in Michelle Helmrich & Nick Mitzevich, prostrate your horses: weather and then some, Rosemary Laing at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, p.16-17)

Image courtesy of the Estate of Rosemary Laing. Photograph by Geoff Boccalatte.

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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.