wa news today: Environmental art of loss and wonder

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Environmental art of loss and wonder

Sandhya Sekar, reporter

Broken Hearted Wood, 2001-13 (Images: Janet Laurence and The Fine Art Society)

An owl watches as the tree it calls home is engulfed by a raging fire. The old tree is giving way to the golden flames licking away at its interior. The heat is almost palpable and the smoke pungent, acrid - though, in reality, you are far from a real conflagration and safe in the heart of London, at the Fine Art Society.

But are you really safe? Environmental artist Janet Laurence?s new show, The Ferment, implies, as the organisers say, both a ?stirring up and a sense of environmental undoing?. She is an artist whose unusual techniques leave you unsettled, uneasy.

Standing in front of Broken Hearted Wood, it is as if you are inside the owl's tree, a disconcerting ghostly apparition that won't go away. When you accidentally catch sight of yourself in the glass covering the work, it's really difficult not to feel that you are part of the picture.

That, of course, is what Laurence is about: she wants you to care about the relationship between the natural and the human worlds.

She draws you in with a powerful mixture of paintings, photographic images and installations. There are transparent images on acrylic, mounted on a background that is sometimes the wall, sometimes a mirror or just a coat of paint. And a "layering" technique adds to the astonishing sense of being there.

Then with more traditional material like oil glaze, and some novel materials like gold pigment and burnt wood, she captures the impact humans have had on our fragile ecosystems.

Gold pigment is what creates the compelling sensation of fire in Broken Hearted Wood, which is from Laurence's Crimes against Landscape series, inspired by the international fight to save the Styx forest in Tasmania, Australia.

She visited the forest, taking with her lab glassware through which she takes photographs, plus special filters for her camera to capture other images she would use later.

The Measure of Loss, 2008

The Measure of Loss, another of the Crimes series, is one of her most powerful works. Against a black, smoky backdrop of burning wood, lab glass is shown in disarray, with green paint running down the work in irregular channels. What we are trying so hard to measure is, in the end, impossible to measure.

"A lot of the images are taken through special lenses and glass filters, not like straight documentary photos by any means. I juxtapose other material, like the pouring of fluid, to link works," says Laurence

The exhibition also features some of Laurence?s work on the Tarkine forest in Tasmania, a temperate forest rich in Aboriginal archaeological sites. The vast, green, almost untouched expanse is now under threat from a mining company looking for iron ore, tin and tungsten.

The version of the Tarkine at the Fine Art Society is a series of panels spanning two walls, all capturing the ethereal beauty of the pristine forest.?The panels position the backdrop and the front piece at an angle to each other, giving each leaf and twig its own distinct shadow. One panel has the sunlight flowing down through lush canopy, transporting us to the very forest floor.

"As I explore human-nature conflict in my art, I feel like I can elicit a level of concern and empathy by dealing with potential or actual loss," says Laurence. Her work on the Tarkine won her the prestigious A$40,000 Glover prize for landscape painting this year.

But it's not all real or impending loss. A series of Laurence's latest work, Photosynthesis Suite, captures leaves at the cellular level.

Prepare to be amazed by beautifully stained plant cells, peer into a stoma - and gaze at rows of chloroplasts frozen in time as they go about producing energy.

Between panels are hand-blown vials with plants in them, putting the process in perspective. "I work a lot with scientists, and I want to try to reveal to the public all the wonderful things they know and see," explains Laurence.

The photosynthesis exhibit is near the steps leading out of the gallery. That's happy positioning, since it allows you to leave with a feeling of hope that life can go on, if only we let it.

The Ferment is on show at the The Fine Art Society, London, until 11 May