Rosemary Laing

We are extremely sad to note the passing of one of Australia’s most internationally esteemed artists, Rosemary Laing.

Laing was one of many Queensland-born artists who left the state in the 1970s and ‘80s, initially moving to lutuwita/Tasmania to study at the Tasmanian School of Art. It was then one of Australia’s most innovative art schools, with teachers including the photographer Geoff Parr and critic Paul Taylor, both of whose work would have an indelible impact on Laing’s practice. She then moved to Gadigal Nura/Sydney, and by the mid-1980s was regularly exhibiting in artist-run spaces such as Artspace work that expanded her training as a painter with sculpture and installation. While Laing always retained her painter’s-eye, her practice was characterised by its formal and methodological expansiveness.

By 1988, the year of the bicentenary of European settlement of Australia, Laing had incorporated photography into her practice – a medium that allowed her to engage materially and directly with the ongoing legacies of colonisation. That year, she made her ground-breaking series Natural disasters. Images sourced from mass media of the Victorian Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983 were brought together with references to the ‘heroic’ tradition of Australian landscape painting, to probe the place of fear and anxiety in the colonial experience of looking at and contact with landscape in Australia. Throughout the 1990s, Laing continued to bring a deeply poetic sensibility to her rigorous examination of the complex and unsettling legacies of colonisation, in carefully conceived series of large-scale colour photographs. The photographs that comprise her 1995 series greenwork, for example, positioned landscape as virtually a green screen, against which our increasingly technological and mediated experience of time and space takes place.

A run of influential series followed, each looking at technologies of flight. The series brownwork 1996 and NASA 1998 saw Laing refine her formal approach, which eschewed digital manipulation in favour of cinematically scaled ‘documentary’ photographs of places and events that drew attention to fundamental paradoxes – in brownwork, which showed people performing on runways among taxiing and flying planes, the incongruities of both human and technological scale and movement, and of natural and technological time and space.

These photographs gave rise to Laing’s internationally acclaimed series flight research 1999, showing a bride flying or falling high above the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. Laing’s flight research had very local origins – the hopefulness she felt at the turn of the century, when Australia was dealing with a referendum that might have seen it become a republic, free of the constitutional legacies of colonisation. But at the same time, the images of brides in mid-air connected with much broader concerns – the prospect of bodies being unfettered from the world of technology and power that, amid fears of millennium bugs and Y2K chaos, consumed global consciousness at this time. flight research marked a turning point in Australian and international photography, and remain among the most recognisable and widely-published images in contemporary art.

These photographs laid the groundwork for an ingenious methodology that informed much of Laing’s work for the following two decades. Using a highly research- and labour-intensive process, Laing produced a run of self-contained but thematically and politically connected series of large-scale photographs that each engaged with the contemporary experience of unsettlement. Her magnificent groundspeed photographs from 2001 saw her carefully lay highly decorative woollen carpets in landscapes such as Morton National Park on Yuin Country, New South Wales. These widely exhibited and collected photographs powerfully literalise the unsettled nature of the colonist’s sense of belonging, and still today can make us feel uneasy – about the state of ‘wilderness’ and the way that virtually every corner of the world has now been ‘domesticated’ by human culture and activity, and about contemporary image-making, since these actually ‘straight’ photographs prefigure an image world of Artificial Intelligence.

Further series of photographic interventions continued to use the attributes of contemporary spectacle (scale, colour, cinematic production) to unpick the hubris of colonisation and power. Laing and her collaborators placed ochre-painted furniture and domestic objects in Central Australia as if they were termite mounds (one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape 2003); she worked with builders to install upside-down housing frames on landscapes in New South Wales (leak 2010), in images that make clear the provisional nature of the colonist’s settling. Her work became increasingly concerned with ecological disaster; in 2017, she and collaborators lined dry creek beds on Yuin Country with floods of discarded clothing and textiles (buddens). Her most recent series swansongs 2024 saw Laing return to sculpture, placing small forms made from shell and stone salvaged from beaches on the New South Wales South Coast alongside large-scaled, elegiac photographs, including one of a fire-damaged South Coast landscape, itself printed on salvaged packaging material. As Laing’s friend, the curator Victoria Lynn wrote of the work: ‘the time has come to work with what remains and that which survives’.

In person, Laing was as considered, expansive and as generous as her work. She was a gifted teacher at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and a great supporter of public culture in Australia. This was reflected in her substantial gift to the National Gallery in 2005 of 13 major photographs from the 1980s and ‘90s. The gallery now looks after 31 works by her, including five artist’s proofs of her most celebrated photographs from the series flight research 1998–2000 and bulletproofglass 2002, acquired in 2021 with the assistance of the Medich Foundation. These photographs were featured in the gallery’s Know My Name exhibition.

We are thinking of Laing’s partner of almost four decades, the wonderful artist and influential teacher Geoff Kleem, and her large extended family. Rosemary’s network of friends and collaborators stretches across the globe, a network that is now mourning the untimely passing of one of contemporary photography’s great figures.