Rosemary Laing, brownwork #1,
#2, #3, installation view,
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney, 1996

These interests are already evident in Natural Disasters, an earlier exhibition of black and white assemblages of paint, photographs and steel from 1988. Natural Disasters incorporated found images from the mass media of events such as droughts and floods, which were greatly amplified and then dissected by a horizontal line to divide the landscape detail from any human presence. The works also bore titles from archetypes of the Australian landscape tradition, invoking the paintings of Streeton, Roberts and Conder. Like Laing’s later work Natural Disasters drawings on the tension between the materiality of expression and the ineffability of the concept while furthering an understanding of place. 1988 was, of course, a year of great navel-gazing about national identity and Laing’s work underline the notion of the Australian landscape as a media construction, perhaps existing as such only at the point of transit.

In From paradise work, it is the unashamedly seductive and indulgent immersion in the hyperreal effects of photochemically enhanced colour which ultimately led to Laing’s romance with the artificial palette of the computer. From paradise work retains the formal cleavage of Natural Disasters although these photographs are stretched along the horizontal plane, acquiring a forward momentum which forms the basis of Laing’s later project, greenwork.

greenwork deals with notions of technological speed and its impact on the representational inscription of place and space. Laing’s focus is the large, awkward bulk of passenger airplanes which, through time lapse photography are reconstructed as evocations of sheer speed; a syneasthetic vapour whose rapidity you can almost hear. These small and seemingly banal photographs documenting a workaday airport, are juxtaposed with overwhelming, digitally constructed portrayals of verdure which are distended to resemble the periphery of flight seen moving through space. Both the time lapse photographs and the tinted, unnatural green of the landscape suggest the pervasive intrusion of technology into our navigation of the "natural" world. Both are denatured and dematerialised in a tension between the unassuming, banal presence of the airport facilities and the insistence of landscape it ignores.

The airplane remains in Laing’s latest work, brownwork. The series comprises of a number of digital and analogue photographs, including a large digital adaptation of the Hubble Space Telescope’s record of the edges of the visible universe, a curious restaging of a javelin thrower aiming at the open bowels of a freight jet, freight awaiting departure, a cargo hold empty except for a woman abseiling from the ceiling, a police rescue team unloading onto the tarmac and two girls playing with a ball on a runway, oblivious to the interdictions of the airport. These disparate images slowly begin to form connections, less a teasing narrative than variations on the theme of passage, of unknown and unknowable trajectories, of the arbitrariness yet inevitability of motion, whether marked by play or by tragedy. Distinct from greenwork, the materiality of the plane has become the focus in this series; the plane is dissected and skinned for our inspection, its innards (or cargo) are gloriously displayed and its gutted interior laid bare. It is as if Laing is trying to unearth the machine’s secret by pulling it apart while retaining the mystery implied in how such a monstrous machine can transcend groundedness in flight.

brownwork emphasises the palpable presence of the aircraft in counterpoint to the dematerialisation that airborne packages and passengers undergo in their conversion to freight or control data. This contrast between the all too material airplane and the immaterial realm of data in transit serves to illustrate the process of unadulterated speed and Laing's interest in the elusive real supplanted by its semblance. Laing is probing those unfathomable spaces where matter in transit becomes information, only to recover the breadth of its bandwidth at its destination. brownwork maintains a sense of awe at the process whereby an object negotiates an invisible web of transactions before emerging on the other side of the world in the hands of the recipient. In the context of new information technologies which, it is claimed, have collapsed space and time into instantaneity, brownwork fixes our attention on that elusive space/time between sending and receiving, emphasising the gap which before such telecommunicative speed are filled with the imagining of expectation.

Laing develops the notion of "brownwork" on a number of levels. Brownwork connotes a certain dullness underlying Laing’s intent to resist photography’s pictorial tradition. Of course this is not a novel approach but a confirmation of her debt to conceptual art where the idea and not the pictorial surface constitutes the work. Yet there is still a romanticism about technology since much of Laing’s work hovers between formalism, narrative and grand ‘emptiness’. Yet Brownwork might also evoke conformity, a quality which Laing’s synthetic images both mimic and interrupt. But brownwork also has a vernacular sense, which she exploits on another panel depicting human excrement, reinforcing the mystery of passage or a wry reference to the artist’s inexorable need to produce.

The logistics of taking pictures for brownwork is also part of its conceptual resolve. Laing has entered into a complex collaboration which has entailed exhaustive negotiations to gain access to the outer edges of those very proscribed sites which she attempts to scrutinise. She is permitted to view cargo holds mid-run, permitted into aircraft storage, onto the tarmac and authorised to witness the secret rites of commercial carriers. Shooting at a "live" airport with operative aircraft, she puts her practice under the strictures of international flight schedules dictated by economic imperatives. The process is a fascinating meeting of diametrically opposed cultures; an artist working to the exigencies of an international airline, her access and creative process dictated by a QANTAS-time culture.

Not surprisingly, Laing is not done with her airplane yet. Her next project is another compelling mix of romance and scientific experiment called Spin destined for exhibition as a photographic, audio-visual installation in 1998-9. Laing’s specific concern here is the evocation of a mind-altering experience induced by intense fear and complete loss of orientation. Laing recently chartered a Tigermoth (an open light place dating from WW1) and, armed with a stills and video camera, was taken for an acrobatic tour over her native Queensland. The plane’s star stunt is the stall fall, where the aircraft switches off its engine and nose-dives, spinning wildly in silence, before recuperating just before impact. The sensations this provokes are extreme: a sense of the impending crash marked by both a visceral aversion and the desire to play out the seemingly inevitable. Yet this ‘inevitable’ is deferred since the crisis is resolved not by death but by the return of another duration experienced through the liberating filter of speed and loss of control.

Laing’s is a dense and intriguing practice, following no established trajectory but rather forging along apace with the artist’s insatiable desire to make sense of her place in the technological landscape. She may not always conjoin the elements of her research seamlessly or even coherently but her attempts to bring our attention to the subtleties of our relationship with technology, and how we manage this relationship through representation, are compelling and provocative.

Rosemary Laing, brownwork #2,
computer painted vinyl,
2.5m x 2.5m, 1996

Rosemary Laing, brownwork
#1, duraflex print,
120cm x 245cm, 1996

Rosemary Laing, brownwork
#9, colour photograph,
120cm x 245cm, 1997.

Rosemary Laing, brownwork
#7, colour photograph,
120cm x 245cm, 1997.