Rosemary Laing

groundspeed #1, 2001
C type photograph (hand printed analogue print)
60 x 123 cm (image); 80 x 143 cm (paper); 83.5 x 147.5 cm (frame); number 10 from an edition of 15
signed, dated and inscribed with title and edition number ‘Rosemary Laing/ground speed #1/small ED# 10/10/2001’ (on the reverse)

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Provenance
The artist
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
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 (another from the edition)
Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2 December 2017-11 February 2018 (another from the edition)

Literature
V Webb, the unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2005, exh. cat., illus. p.10 & p.31
A. Solomon-Godeau, Rosemary Laing, Piper Press, Sydney, 2012, illus. p.96-97 V. Lynn & J. Annear, Rosemary Laing, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2017, illus. p.21

Migration and the adaption to a new environment are major concerns throughout the world. In her series groundspeed, Rosemary Laing looked particularly at the Australian situation, symbolically capturing the process of colonisation and the domestication of our native environment, through her images depicting British 1970s carpets laid in lush south coast landscapes.

"Shot on the south coast of New South Wales, groundspeed #1 (2001) shows the vista of a wooded shoreline across glassy water, with only gentle ripples disturbing the reflections of the sky above. The investigations raised in this series correspondingly move from the idealistic imaginings and contemporary modes of transportation of the previous series (flight research) to historic arrivals on the shores of Australia. groundspeed #1 is one work that does not entail an intervention but, through an idyllic vista of land across water, evokes the anticipation of the arrival inherent in a migrant journey." (Vivienne Webb, the unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing, MCA, Sydney, 2005, p.10)

Image courtesy of the Estate of Rosemary Laing

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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.