Rosemary Laing

burning Ayer #1, 2003
C type photograph
49 x 80 cm (image); 72 x 102 cm (frame); number 2 from an edition of 10 (small)
signed ‘Rosemary Laing’ on label with printed details of the work (all on the reverse)

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Provenance
Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney
Acquired from the above in 2003

Exhibited
Rosemary Laing – one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape, Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney, 22 October – 15 November 2003, cat. 3 (this work)
The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 25 March- 5 June 2005; Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark, 19 May – 3 September 2006 (another from the edition)

Literature
V Webb, The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005, exh. cat., illus. p.62
A. Solomon-Godeau, Rosemary Laing, Piper Press, Sydney, 2012, illus. p.130 B French & D Palmer, Twelve Australian Photo Artists, Piper Press, Sydney, 2009, Illus. p. 98

"In three components from this series, scrub, brumby mound and burning Ayer (all 2003), the red soil of the land of this area covers the forms of the mass-produced modernist furniture. Unlike the antique bridal dress and retro carpet designs featured in other series, these familiar shapes are devoid of ornament, instead taking on the identity and skin of the land as though encrusted with sediment over time. It is particularly telling to have these generic ‘international style’ lounge room objects, with tendencies towards amnesia, located within such a specific location and environment which has seen millennia of Indigenous history and the more recent period of colonisation and dispossession. The furniture is poignantly arranged in relation to the desert landscape as though camouflaged and seeking integration amongst the Spinifex mounds or amassed in a funeral pyre." (Vivienne Webb, The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005, exh. cat., p.13)

Image courtesy of the Estate of Rosemary Laing

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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.