This education kit was produced for the 2015 exhibition Rosemary Laing: transportation . It presents a selection of focus works from the exhibition along with questions and activities for students in Years K-6 and 7-12.
Click on an image for more information (including medium and dimensions) and to view the work in the Gallery collection.
This installation by Australian artist Rosemary Laing showcases her entire 1995 series greenwork alongside photographs from the related 1996–97 series brownwork. Both bodies of work examine the complex relationship between technology, labour, time and speed through an engagement with place.
In greenwork, warped landscape panoramas printed on vinyl are accompanied by time-lapse photographs of planes caught in the midst of their ascent. Velocity and movement infiltrate these static photographs. The blurred planes trace imperceptible lines of force while the digitally manipulated landscapes are elastic. Laing returned to the airport in brownwork to record the technological and spatial infrastructure of flight. These photographs consider the transience that air travel induces through the apparatus of the airport itself.
While a conscious connection to place anchors each image, the intrusion of motion splinters the photographed site. Spaces are disoriented and thrown into a state of flux. As Laing stated in her studio notes, these works examine how technologies of transmission confront us ‘not with a memory of presence, but with the experience of never being present, never static … and being at best in-between’.
Questions and activities
Think about the full title of this exhibition. What type of transportation is being referred to? Look at the works that have been included. Considering the exhibition title, are the images what you expected? Discuss.
Collect images of airports and planes. What makes them different or similar to Rosemary Laing’s images? What makes her images distinctive? How do they make you feel?
Have you ever been to an airport? Recall what you remember or imagine what you might see. Research what goes on behind the scenes of an airport.
How long do people spend in an airport? Is anyone ever settled in that space or do they only pass through? List words to describe how you might feel when you are there. Find a space or place near you that people move through, but do not inhabit. Spend time in this place observing and recording everything that happens. Create an artwork based on your observations.
By photographing the industrial and in-between spaces in which flight occurs, what comment is Laing making in relation to the way we exist in the world?
Choose an artwork in this exhibition. How has Laing conveyed a sense of speed? How fast or slow is the movement? Why do you think she wants to show us this particular aspect?
What do you think is meant by hyperreal? Think about some of the words that have been used to describe Laing’s hyperreal landscape panoramas eg stretched, elastic, distorted, warped, disrupted, lurid. Use these words as a starting point to create your own hyperreal landscape.
Laing’s hyperreal landscape panoramas are digitally-manipulated reproductions of black and white photographs by Peter Elliston. The revised photographs deny any connection to the real or natural with their dense webs of pixels saturated in lurid hues. They resemble roadside billboards, printed at low resolution on vinyl so they are legible when seen in passing and at high speed. Stretched and warped, the landscapes oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Like a glitch in a cinematic panning shot, these distortions fracture the formal cohesion of photography itself by disrupting an ordinarily seamless image surface.
Laing’s time-lapse photographs of ascending planes are inverse counterparts for the pictorial distortions in her hyperreal landscape panoramas from the same series. The moving planes are studies of acceleration compressed into the still image. They metaphorically identify the airport as a space of transit and transmission that we move through but do not inhabit. The planes hover like unsettled, nomadic apparitions.
In brownwork Laing turns her attention to the structures that facilitate air travel. Photographing empty airfreight containers and cargo in transit from above, she examines the industrial and in-between spaces where flight occurs. The processes and machinery that make travel possible are often obscured by the mask of technological efficiency, but here Laing exposes them.
Through travel we transcend the boundaries of time and space; far flung destinations become adjacent neighbours and time folds back on itself. Revealing the labour and resources involved from unfamiliar vantage points, Laing dramatises the mechanics of this transitory state