Rosemary Laing

Drapery and wattle from the Buddens series, 2017
archival pigment print on paper
59 x 90.5 cm (image); 73 x 94.5 cm (frame); 1 from an edition of 8
signed, dated and inscribed ‘Rosemary Laing/Drapery and wattle/1/8 2017’ (on the reverse)

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Provenance
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Acquired by the present owner from the above on 12 September 2017

Exhibited
Another from the edition
Tolarno Galleries at Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Sydney, September 2017
Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2 December 2017-11 February 2018
Buddens, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 2018

Literature
Victoria Lynn & Judy Annear, Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2017, illus. p.73

Drapery and wattle comes from Rosemary Laing’s Buddens series (2017), a body of photographs taken on Budawang Country (Yuin Nation) on the New South Wales south coast.

Laing’s interventions in the landscape included a large timber roof frame, protruding from the landscape as if half-buried, and rivers of warm-coloured fabric lengths surrounded by rainforest foliage. Victoria Lynn has described these as evoking “human or ‘unnatural’ disasters” from Australia’s colonial and modern history.(1)

The titles of the Buddens works referred variously to stories of shipwrecks and rescues by Aboriginal peoples, as well as allusions to works by Margaret Preston and—in the case of drapery and wattle—Grace Cossington Smith, whose 1952 painting of the same title is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s permanent collection. In Cossington Smith’s original still life, golden wattle cuttings sit in a vase, surrounded by fabric arranged in small hillocks. In Laing’s image, there are echoes of Cossington Smith’s colours in the drapery river.

Of this series in the catalogue for Laing’s major 2017 exhibition at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Judy Annear writes: “In Buddens, as viewers, we stand in the middle of a flood gazing, unable or unwilling to provide shelter. We are also, if we think about it, looking at ourselves streaming past, blindly and contrarily upstream, towards what we hope will be survival and refuge, somewhere.”(2)

Annear then quoted Laing herself, who reflected on the passage of people through the landscape and the effects that even a moment of disruption can have both upon nature and the people who call that land their home: “The arrival of people, throughout history, shifts what happens in land, challenging those who have left their elsewhere, and disrupting the continuum of their destination place. A disruption causes a reconfiguration. It elaborates both the beforehand and the afterward.” (3)

1. Victoria Lynn, Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2017, p.10
2. Judy Annear, in Victoria Lynn (ed.), Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2017, p.16
3. Ibid, p,16.

Jack Howard, 2026

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.