The Australian art world is in mourning, having lost two icons of Australian art in one week. Following the recent passing of Destiny Deacon is the loss of contemporary photographer Rosemary Laing after a short illness.
Laing was one of Australia’s most revered photographic artists. Her work has been shown at the Biennale of Sydney, Venice Biennale, Busan Biennale and Istanbul Biennale, and she is represented in all major public collections in Australia, as well as numerous significant international collections.
“We are immensely saddened by the passing of Rosemary Laing,” said Tolarno Galleries in a statement, who represented Laing for 18 years. “One of Australia’s most revered artists, her images are embedded in our psyche. We will forever remember her ‘iconic’ brides soaring through the sky and her brilliantly Unquiet Landscapes. And we will always hold close to us, how inspiring it was to work with such a hugely creative, wonderfully tough, artist.”
Born in Brisbane in 1959, Rosemary Laing lived and worked in Sydney creating project-based photographic work with a cinematic quality—often using the performance of her subjects and the installation of scenes to capture distinctive moments in real time. She placed an emphasis on location, often using sites with cultural and/or historical resonance—the Blue Mountains, eucalyptus forests in South Australia, and the Central Desert among them.
flight research, a series of works from 2000, is often considered Laing’s ‘breakthrough’ series. It is the first appearance of her iconic floating bride—a stunt woman in a wedding dress suspended and captured mid-air. She reappeared in bulletproofglass in 2002, this time with gunshot wounds staining her white dress. Laing’s influence for this violent scene was the failure of the Republic referendum as well as the resistance to an apology to the Stolen Generations.
In March 2024, Tolarno Galleries held an exhibition of Laing’s latest works, titled swansongs. The show featured photographs taken in 2019 of charred bushland off the coast of New South Wales, near Laing’s family home. Laing said the 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.”
Rosemary Laing, 1959—2024.
Suggested Reading
The ceramics of the Central Desert
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
About Face mirrors the alluring world of contemporary portrait painting
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Jane O'Sullivan
Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana and inherited influence
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Stitching the self
Curated by Lee Kinsella, Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered—on now at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery—looks at how woven and fibre objects align with the human form, encompassing the practices of over thirty artists working across textiles, painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation.
Briony Downes
The miniature worlds of Kyoko Imazu
In a new exhibition at Australian Galleries, Kyoko Imazu’s intricate papercuts show worlds in miniature—Some of works are only 15 centimetres tall, yet their detail is meticulous.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When finally makes sense of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank. It is worth the plane flight.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.