Photographer and art teacher, was born in Brisbane but has lived and worked in Sydney for years. She originally trained as a painter; she has a Dip Art Education, Brisbane CAE 1976-79; Dip Art, TU School of Art 1982; Postgraduate diploma SCA 1990-91, MFA Hons I, UNSW CoFA 1992-96. Since about 1988, however, she has been producing enormous photographs 'at the interface of nature and technology’ (Alexander 2001). She exhibits at Gitte Weise Galleries, Paddington, and teaches at UNSW CoFA. Natural Disasters (1988) 'saw the idea of the Australian landscape as a kind of media construction, existing only as point of transit’, Alexander states, while from paradise work (1990-91) 'explored the hyperral effects on plexiglass and cibachrome: a second nature where nature is swallowed up by artifice’. Blow-out was at Annandale Gallery in 1993. Her series greenwork (1995) and b rownwork (1996-97) began her explorations of the interface of nature and technology. In greenwork she digitally reworked four panoramic landscapes of trees by photographer Peter Elliston by transforming all points into lines. 'Locale and landscape was blown up onto computer printed vinyl, converting it into a hailstorm of pixels, or information signals… With the help of Sydney Airport (FAC), the artist created images that changed jets into a kind of condensed ground fog’ (Alexander). The series was first shown at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport in 1995. Aero-zone was shown at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan in 1999.
Laing’s series Flight research (1998-2000) looked at 'photographers who assume the role of director in relationship to their subjects’. The series is of a beautiful woman in a white dress with a skirt like a cloud floating in the sky (Candice Bruce owns the most famous one in the series). After being shown at Gitte Weise in 2000, flight research series was included in group shows at the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts (December 2001-March 2002, with Gregory Crewdson USA and Sharon Lockhart USA), then in Constructed Realities at the Grand Arts Foundation, Kansas City (with Tracey Moffatt and three blokes – all presumably Yanks).
Laing’s next series, groundspeed 2001 (funded by Feltex carpets and a small UNSW ARC grant), consisted of large coloured photographs of bush locations on the remote South Coast of NSW: a 'ferny dell’ at the George Boyd Lookout, what remains of the big timber country near Morton National Park, and a rocky outcrop in an old bluestone quarry at Kiama. In each the ground was replaced by an old-fashioned Feltex carpet (fitted on site, not digitally manipulated), each of a different floral pattern: Red Piazza c.1972, Rose Petal (from England, c.1930) and Harrogate Flower (1978) respectively. The sites were selected, measured and photographed, the three carpets cut in Sydney, installed on site and the locations rephotographed on negative film in panoramic (wide and superwide) focus. From the 23+ rolls of film she took, a very few images were selected and blown up for exhibition at Gitte Weise (29 August-22 September 2001), followed by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, ARCO in Madrid and the Armory, New York.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
