ROSEMARY LAING weathering
Presented in association with ART + CLIMATE = CHANGE 2015 a Melbourne-wide festival seeking to harness the creative power of the arts to inform, engage and inspire action on climate change. Festival dates: 11 April – 17 May 2015 www.climarte.org
ROSEMARY LAING weathering Sue Cramer
Mysterious weather events of the artist’s own making are shown in this selection of photographs from two different series by Rosemary Laing. Depicting scenes created in real time, of a performer in a film studio and material embedded in a landscape, these images describe weather as a phenomenon arising from human rather than purely meteorological activity. In weather, 2006, a woman is tossed about in a maelstrom of shredded newspapers, a figurative storm created by the confusing whirl of information and hype, fact and opinion that makes up our daily news cycle. The Paper, 2013, shows pages of newspaper covering the floor of a casuarina forest, like a pale carpet or shroud. Once-urgent news reports fade as the paper —a product of forest timber—weathers and returns to the earth. The two groups of images are set across the gallery in counterpoint with one another. While the woman turns through air, the forest is resolutely grounded, and the cyclone’s turbulence contrasts with the eerie calm of the forest. While weather depicts what Laing considers a ‘no-place’, a locationless setting conjured by the relative neutrality of the rented film studio, The Paper is situated within the woodlands of Bundanon, the property bequeathed to the nation by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales, where Laing was artist-in-residence. The Wodi Wodi people of the Yuin nation are the traditional owners of this land, which also since the early 1880s has had a history of Anglo European occupation, and in layering her newspapers on the forest floor, Laing was keenly aware of these already-present strata of cultural memory.
Heide Museum of Modern Art
While alluding to natural occurrences like a cyclone, flood or snowstorm, weather and The Paper also evoke a metaphorical ‘weather’, the type we describe when we speak of ‘the climate of our times’. The woman in weather, as Laing describes in her notes, is ‘buffeted by the elements … suspended by a vortex of influence … over which she cannot exert individual agency’.1 From the sixteen works that comprise the series, Laing has chosen two that convey quite different moods. The more menacing is weather #3; its dark spaces close in around a centralised figure who appears inescapably drawn into a dimly lit whirlpool. By contrast weather #6 is light and airy, its swirls and eddies less frenzied and distressing than in some other images from the series, its barrage of newspaper fragments suggesting disorientation and confusion but also ticker-tape or confetti. Such elements find a different, more material iteration in the intimately scaled working drawings for weather which incorporate the medium of collage. Here the same airborne woman rendered in ink, pencil and paint is almost obliterated from view by the gale of actual newspaper pieces blowing around her. Both troubling and compelling, Laing’s images of involuntary flight recall elusive dreamlike states. They arose from Laing’s sense of impotence and frustration in the face of a political and cultural conservatism. Her picturing of a figure ‘at the mercy of external forces’ initially came from her own deep sense of the individual’s inability to significantly alter the course of wider events, in particular during the decade of conservative government in Australia from the mid-1990s, a period she saw as ‘shameful and bleak’.2
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ROSEMARY LAING: WEATHERING
In the light of more recent and increasing concern about global warming, Laing’s shredded papers and stormy conditions could evoke the bluster, about-turns and broken promises of successive governments, and the whirlwind of competing interests and weather-vane politics that has stalled or compromised effective action on climate change.3 The Paper’s beautiful yet strange forest scenes sound a more elegiac, portentous note. Here Laing has created what looks like the aftermath of an uncanny deluge leaving viewers to reflect upon its open-ended meanings. Robert Nelson describes this work in almost biblical terms: ‘a flood of newsprint has inundated the bush as if the rivers run media instead of water and the daily noise of commerce has deposited itself over nature like a fibrous silt that is destined to rot’.4 Nature had, by chance, intervened in the artist’s process when a flood occurred soon after Laing and her team had laid the newspapers down, cutting their access to the area for days. By the time she shot her photographs, the drenched newspapers had seeped into the earth, showing the effects of the elements far more than she had intended—a reminder that when it comes to the forces of nature we are never totally in control. The power of nature was brought home to Laing by the floods and cyclones she experienced as a child in Queensland. Frightening and euphoric to her in equal measure, she remembers ‘their atmosphere, luminous colours and greens, and amazing torrential rain.5 A sense of wonder and awe at the natural world still underpins Laing’s work.
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Heide Museum of Modern Art
Both series represented here symbolically extend Laing’s longterm interest in extreme weather and states of nature, and in the themes of natural and unnatural (or human-made) disasters that she has explored in her work since the late 1980s.6 Presented at Heide as part of the festival ART + CLIMATE = CHANGE 2015, this exhibition join a wider arts-led discussion around the threats posed by global warming. Within this context, Laing’s enigmatic and powerful allegories of human activity in the natural world remind us that a change in the weather is needed, in this case to the climate of understanding, policy and action that we bring to meet this vital challenge. 1 Rosemary Laing, unpublished notes for weather, 2005–06. 2 Ibid. 3 For a discussion of recent successes and failures on both sides of politics see Philip Chubb, Power Failure: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne, 2014. 4 Robert Nelson, ‘Bush consumed by pulp affliction in Rosemary Laing exhibition at Tolarno Galleries’, The Age, 30 April 2014, http://www.theage. com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/bush-consumed-by-pulp-afflictionin-rosemary-laing-exhibition-at-tolarno-galleries-20140429-37fsj.html, accessed 17 February 2015. 5 Sue Cramer, conversation with the artist, 10 February 2015. 6 Notably her series Natural Disasters, 1988, and one dozen natural disasters in the Australian landscape, 2003.
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weather drawing #13 2006
weather drawing #14 2006
weather #3 2006
weather #6 2006
The Paper, Tuesday 2013
The Paper, Wednesday 2013
The Paper, Thursday 2013
Heide Museum of Modern Art
BIOGRAPHY Rosemary Laing was born in 1959 in Brisbane and now lives in Sydney. She completed a Diploma of Art Education at Brisbane College of Advanced Education, Brisbane in 1976–1979; a Diploma of Art at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart in 1982; a Post Graduate Diploma at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 1990–91; and a Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1992–96. Her first solo exhibition Natural Disasters was held at Artspace in Sydney in 1988, travelling to Milburn + Arte Gallery in Brisbane in 1989. Since then she has held more than forty solo exhibitions in museums and dealer galleries in Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the USA including survey exhibitions at the Brisbane City Gallery in 2003; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2005, travelling to the Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, in Odense, Denmark, in 2006; and at The University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane in 2009. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Australia and internationally since 1990 including The Istanbul Biennale, Turkey in 1995; the Busan Biennale, South Korea in 2004; the Venice Biennale, Italy in 2007; the Sydney Biennale in 2008. Laing’s work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, in all Australian state gallery collections, and in numerous museum collections abroad, among them: the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, USA; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA She is represented by Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne; Galerie Lelong in New York, and Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf.
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ROSEMARY LAING: WEATHERING
EXHIBITED WORKS Rosemary Laing weather #3 2006 type C photograph 110 × 166 cm edition 6/8 Private collection, Melbourne
The Paper, Tuesday 2013 type C photograph 90 × 189 cm edition 1/8 Private collection, Melbourne
weather #6 2006 type C photograph 110 × 175 cm edition 6/8 Private collection, Melbourne
The Paper, Wednesday 2013 type C photograph 90 × 177.5 cm edition 2/8 Ten Cubed Collection, Melbourne
weather drawing #13 2006 paint, pencil on paper and acetate 21 × 29.7 cm Collection of Mark Hughes
The Paper, Thursday 2013 type C photograph 90 × 187 cm edition 4/8 Collection of Carey Lyon and Jo Crosby
weather drawing #14 2006 paint, pencil on paper and acetate 21 × 29.7 cm Collection of Tess Knight
measurements are image size
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Produced on the occasion of the exhibition: ROSEMARY LAING: WEATHERING Curated by Sue Cramer Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Saturday 21 February – Sunday 31 May 2015
7 Templestowe Road Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia T +61 3 9850 1500 F +61 3 9852 0154 heide.com.au
This exhibition has been supported by the Bequest of Erica McGilchrist, an artist and activist, who advanced the standing of women’s art throughout her lifetime. © Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, authors, designer and photographers. Design: Tristan Main Installation photography: Christian Capurro ISBN: 978-1-921330-39-1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sue Cramer warmly acknowledges Rosemary Laing for her work on this exhibition. Thanks also to Carey Lyon and Jo Cosby, Mark Hughes, Tess Knight, Ten Cubed Collection and other private lenders for kindly lending works to this exhibition. Appreciation is expressed to Jan Minchin and the staff of Tolarno Galleries for their helpful assistance and to Heide staff, particularly Exhibition Manager Samantha Vawdrey and Designer Tristan Main. Rosemary Laing would like to thank Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; The Bundanon Trust, Illaroo, New South Wales; and the private collectors for making works available to Heide for this exhibition.