Rosemary Laing in her Petersham studio in 2005. Credit: Stephen Baccon
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As a follow-up to flight research, Laing featured the same suspended bride with a gunshot wound, floating in the sky and seeming to defy gravity. This series, bulletproofglass, was said to have been influenced by the failure of the Republic referendum and government resistance to an apology to the Stolen Generations.
Laing famously photographed the floor of a NSW south coast forest with a floral patterned carpet for the series Groundspeed.
In 2005, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a major survey of Laing’s work, which travelled to Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik in Denmark.
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Bundanon Trust chief executive, Rachel Kent, said Rosemary Laing was one of the great photo media artists of her generation.
During her residency at Bundanon, Laing created The Paper (2014), a haunting photographic series in which newspaper sheets literally merged into a wilderness setting. It was “a slowly decomposing blanket of human words and fury, lost against the impervious time of the Australian bush”, Kent said.
“Boundaries never hampered Laing, who transcended them through motion, flight, and themes of transformation in her art.
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“Eschewing digital means, Laing worked in situ to construct her dramatic tableaux, with performers from athletes to stunt-women, and other collaborators.”
Rosemary Laing’s flight research (1999).Credit: © Rosemary Laing
Laing’s most recent solo exhibition, swansongs, featured photographs taken in 2019 of charred bushland, a short distance from Laing’s family holiday home on the NSW South Coast.
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For Laing, this body of work was about “a love of, an attachment to, homeland or
places of belonging … all the memories and histories that have stemmed from that
place, and the making of a kind of ‘song’ that combines the enigma of this
attachment with a sadness for what has happened in this place”.
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Born in Brisbane in 1959, Laing originally trained as a painter and changed mediums after editing the work of photographers for the travelling Australian Bicentennial Exhibition in 1988.
Laing’s work can be found in all major public collections in Australia, including the Art Gallery of South Australia.
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