Rosemary Laing

‘The so called dead-heart of the country remains a metaphysical anti-place, where memory is boundless and a sense of loss never quite disappears.’[1] GRANTPIRRIE Projects are delighted to present, from the series of photographs, one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape by Rosemary Laing - the collaboration with Stephen Birch.

This collaboration presents direct casts from the faces of peers from their community in Sydney - artists and artworkers. Using these disembodied heads, Laing has created haunting vistas in the Australian outback. remembering Babylon sees the heads strewn along the banks of a saline water bore, while between heaven and belonging features the unassuming faces air-borne in the Balgo region of Western Australia.

The project combines Birch’s original sculptures, Cosmos, and Laing’s photographic vision to illustrate a poignant and ongoing allegory. The displaced heads attempt to metaphorically bridge the eastern seaboard and central Australia.

Laing is a master of a representational language that taps deftly into the darker prehistory of the Australian consciousness. The scenarios she has painstakingly constructed for this series explore the contentious subject of white Australia’s relationship with a country deeply entrenched with Indigenous history and an ill-fated colonial past. The misdemeanours of white colonisation are echoed by the ghostly scene of unseeing white faces scattered around the salinated bore hole; symbolic testament to both the cultural and environmental atrocities committed during the colonisation process. There is a sense of dislocation in the imagery that makes up these ‘disasters’; their disembodiment accentuates their unnatural situation, they do not ‘belong’ here.

Place is critical to this suite of works. The historical and spiritual aura of regional Australia and the varying perspectives of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians constitute the foundation of this series. In producing these works, Laing worked closely with the traditional owners of the Balgo area, the Warlayirti artists and Wirrimanu Community. Their knowledge of the sites and permission to work with them in these areas was vital to the project.

In these works Laing retells a story of which most Australians are hyper-aware. A story reconstituted in so many forms we are in danger of complacency or catharsis. The paradoxes within these photographs impart new and existing reminders essential to our collective memory.

Rosemary Laing has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions worldwide. Her very recent activities include curated group exhibitions: Defying Gravity, North Carolina Museum of Art; Memory and Landscape, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain; Busan Biennale, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Korea; The Fleeting Moment Between Photography And Cinema, Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin, Italy; As Heavy as Heaven - Transformations of Gravity, Landesmuseum Joanneum, Austria. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain; Galerie Lelong in New York, Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf, Brisbane City Art Gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, is also presenting a retrospective of her work in March this year.

Pressetext

Rosemary Laing: one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape
A Collaboration with Stephen Birch