Rosemary Laing
(Australia 1959– )
- Title
- brumby mound #6, from the series one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape
- Year
- 2003
- Media
- Photograph
- Medium
- type C photograph
- Dimensions
- 110.0 x 225.0cm
- Credit
- Gift of Andrew Cameron 2011. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
- Accession number
- 149.2011
- Copyright
- © Rosemary Laing
- Location
- 20th and 21st c Australian art
- Further information
The deep space of the desert echoes through ‘brumby mound #6’ from the series ‘one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape’ 2003. In the distance of this image there are massive worn rocky mountains, while in the foreground furniture coated in red-brown dust clusters in the scrub. The epic depth of focus recorded in the panoramic view overwhelms the furniture in the foreground and yet it is a quietly insistent presence. The furniture itself is of a generic international modernist style, the sort of furniture which erases a sense of specific place and implies we’re all part of an affordable global culture. The incongruous fact of finding this furniture in the Australian desert echoes the disorienting sense of space and time that has marked non-indigenous encounters with the desert landscape.
The desert is a place of belonging for the traditional land owners, in this case the Wirrimanu community near Balgo in the north east of Western Australia. Historically it has been a place of unbelonging for the many non-indigenous who have failed to adapt and accommodate to an environment which has often been termed harsh, unforgiving and hostile. The European concept of ‘terra nullius’ found its most complete embodiment in the determination to see this vast area of land as uninhabited. This wilful misrepresentation haunted the colonial psyche as the desert became a locus of anxiety and fear, a void which threatened to suck in Australia’s predominately coastal settlements.
In the mid-20th century however artists turned from looking for a contemporary subject matter in the city to find a local modernist idiom in representations of the desert. It became engrained in our visual culture as a form of psychic landscape in which great age, disturbing recent history and intimations of the future met.
More recently the dead centre has become the red centre of tourist campaigns which promote it as an ancient, authentic and unique Australia, masking the history of conflict and interaction since colonisation. But as Ross Gibson has written, “Forgetting simply does not work. Wishful amnesia is no protection against memories of actual, lived experience. The events of the past rarely pass. They leave marks in documents, in bodies, in communities and places, in buildings, streets and landscape”.1 A residue of memory filters through Laing’s record of this spectacular visual environment. Her interventions into the landscape are marked by an awareness of the history of human encounter in the desert and its powerful symbolic presence in the memory of all Australians whether we have been there or not. Laing’s placing of generic home furnishings into a markedly specific landscape and camouflaging the furniture in local dirt remains an enigmatic act while embodying some of the contradictions and tensions between the global and the local, the generic and the specific, and how place is conceived and experienced as both familiar and strange.
1. Ross Gibson, ‘Seven versions of an Australian badland’, University of Queensland Press, 2002, p179
- Bibliography (3)
-
Stormy Weather: contemporary landscape photography (2010), Isobel Crombie (Australia) (Author), Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (Australia, estab. 2002).
Twelve Australian Photo Artists (2009), Blair French (Author), Daniel Palmer (Australia) (Author), Piper Press (Australia).
The unquiet landscapes of Rosemary Laing (2005), Vivienne Webb (Australia) (Author), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (United States of America) (Author), Museum of Contemporary Art (Australia, estab. 1989), Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.