ROSEMARY LAING The Paper

*1959 Brisbane, lives in Sydney

Rosemary Laing is internationally recognised as a leader in the field of concept-based photo media. Laing's pictures are evocative and symbolically open-ended, with enough suggestiveness to stimulate the poet George Alexander to write beautiful lines. He sees "a cacophony of printed voices" on the soil, a "cultural carpet of current events and mercenary babble".

Ironically, paper is a forest product; and its return to the site of its material manufacture, after being imprinted with all the energies that pulled it into the economy, is uncanny. Now, as Alexander says, it is "typographic stew, falling apart like old lacework, dissolving like paint". It signals another kind of weathering, a constant displacement of one voice by another, as each column or advertisement is washed away by another in a torrent of messages.

The media still have a physical incarnation that makes this morass more tangible. The fragile paper still supports all the images and words that are now spread out in the bush in putrifying overlap; and with this decomposition, the photographs stage the return of metaphor. It is the mire of ideas, the sludge, the pulp, the scum, as cynical readers - or even rival newspapers - describe what is in the press. _ Excerpt from Robert Nelson on Rosemary Laing´s The Paper, 2015