Rosemary Laing

after Heysen from the series 'to walk on a sea of salt', 2004
Type C photograph, 2 from an edition of 7
110 x 252 cm – image; 127.2 x 269.2 cm – frame
signed and inscribed 'Rosemary Laing/After Heysen/2/7 large 2004' (on the reverse and as noted by vendor but not seen)

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Provenance
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Acquired from the above in May 2005

Exhibited
another from the edition was exhibited in
The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 25 March- 5 June 2005; Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark, 19 May – 3 September 2006
Rosemary Laing: to Walk on a sea of salt, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 27 February – 6 April 2008

Literature
V Webb, The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005, exh. cat., illus. p.67 & p.73
Tanya Peterson, Rosemary Laing: to Walk on a sea of salt, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008, exh, cat, illus. unpaginated
B French & D Palmer, Twelve Australian Photo Artists, Piper Press, Sydney, 2009, Illus. p. 103
A. Solomon-Godeau, Rosemary Laing, Piper Press, Sydney, 2012, illus. pp.137

after Heysen is an image derived – in title and in composition – from Summer, 1909, a watercolour by German-Australian artist Sir Hans Heysen that won the 1909 Wynne Prize. The aged, imposing gum tree on the right, naturally stripped of some of its bark, leads the eye across a desiccated riverbed into the heat-scorched bush.

'While this reference to Heysen's earlier work evokes an Arcadian image of the Australian bush, Laing's bleached out interpretation straddles in shift in his work, and of the times, which had embraced the scorched regions of the outback as a new symbol of hope. Yet Laing's revision does more than merely reiterate the sentiments of the past. The bleached effect of overexposure in after Heysen serves to screen points of pictorial information, leaving the ambiguity of nostalgia unfiltered by the lens of colonialism." (Tanya Peterson, Rosemary Laing: to Walk on a sea of salt, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008, exh, cat, illus. unpaginated)

Image courtesy of the Estate of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

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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.