Rosemary Laing

Rosemary Laing is a renowned Australian artist who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She creates projects in the Australian landscape, often introducing items from the built environment—furniture, carpets, clothing, and newspapers—into areas of dense foliage, coastal rock platforms, and the desert. These complex installations result in photographs by the artist in which landscape is understood as an intermingling of stories: Indigenous, colonial, settler, contemporary, natural, and unnatural. Laing asks, how do we belong in the Australian landscape? Who is displaced? Who is the alien?

Spanning thirty years of her practice, the photographs in this exhibition depict the Australian landscape as a place of arrival and departure, of home and the uncanny. Rosemary Laing includes major works that demonstrate her interest in how Australians have both perceived and moved through the landscape, shifting between dramatic vistas in works such as the leak and one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape series, through to her interventions in the thickest of bushland in The Paper and groundspeed series. Colonisation, political borders and boundaries, and the interface of the made and the natural environment are persistent themes explored in her works, as seen in her new series Buddens, 2017.

This exhibition has been generously sponsored by the Museum’s Summer Exhibition Series partner, the Balnaves Foundation.