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Despite the patriotic song celebrating our 'radiant Southern Cross', how many artists here have actually depicted our skies? Where are Australia's Turner, Constable and Claude? There are glimpses in Streeton, atmospheric effects in the impressionists, and a number of contemporary artists have finally turned to it, but throughout the great nationalistic period of Australian art the sky as subject matter seems to have been forbidden. In Frederic McCubbin's claustrophobic bush, we are lost, unable to do much more than look for a way out. In the steeply rising wheatfields and deserts of Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, the horizon is barely there, a mere compositional device to prevent the canvas from becoming flat.

It is perhaps only with the end of this landscape tradition that the sky as such can begin to be depicted. Until then, Australian painters concentrated on what was real, what was underfoot, what precisely marked them as Australian. There is perhaps no more interesting an exercise than to go through the history of Australian art, dividing painters up into those who produced landscapes and those who looked to the sky. The two different subject matters correspond to two opposed conceptions of art, two antithetical traditions: the first, of course, being Australian; and the second what we might call 'UnAustralian'.

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The 'weather' series, returning to the geographical specificity that characterises Laing's earlier work, is shot in part around the biblically-named southern New South Wales coastal town of Eden. The place is known both for being an early whaling station and its preponderance of severe thunderstorms. It is perhaps too much to suggest that the storm Laing depicts is a judgement by God, a form of retribution for past crimes against nature. She is not suggesting a directly interventionist God in this sense. Whatever causes these storms remains firmly off-camera. But the heavens have always been the symbol of what is not known, what cannot be controlled by us, what remains forever out of reach. They are that place where the future is born, the heavens stand for the fate that more and more seems to be approaching and also for the slim possibility that something may arise before this to save us.
 

It is a moment that is brief indeed, for in Laing's series 'bulletproofglass', 2002, we see the bride shot down out of the sky. In the first image of the series we watch her looking up in shock, beginning to register what is happening to her. Then, in the images that follow, she tumbles down amidst a flutter of birds' wings, plunging stricken to the ground. Her dreams of transcendence, of breaking her ties to this world are over. (Is it any coincidence that this series came in the wake of the defeat of the referendum for an Australian Republic and the refusal of the Australian Federal Government to say sorry to the country's original inhabitants, two acts that might have helped us break with our colonial past?)
It is at this point that we might turn again to 'weather'. Laing says of the series:

I think we have been through a period when nothing the individual can do will make any difference. We are at the mercy of external forces, events exist outside of individual control.
And certainly in a number of images from the series, in which a child-like figure is held up limply in the air or thrown around in a maelstrom of coloured paper, we have a sense of the human as a frail and vulnerable object subject to greater forces. She is a foil to the bride, whom we see fly through an act of will - this again is why it is so important that it is a real body in space and not computer manipulation - there is a sense of forces superior to us, of events that cannot be navigated or steered through.

In other works from the series, we have a leafless and flattened melaleuca forest, as though it exists in the aftermath of an enormous storm or has been trodden on by a giant. There is an eerie stillness to these images, brought out by the monochromatic rendering of the bush and the skein of red fishing net that finds itself snagged on a branch like a trickle of blood. It is a reminder that, for all our emphasis on drawing boundaries around ourselves (and thus excluding others), we are all caught up in phenomena that go beyond us, that cross over every boundary or territorial division we could ever hope to draw. Before the incomprehensible forces of nature we are all as innocent and unknowing as children.

The 'weather' series, returning to the geographical specificity that characterises Laing's earlier work, is shot in part around the biblically-named southern New South Wales coastal town of Eden. The place is known both for being an early whaling station and its preponderance of severe thunderstorms. It is perhaps too much to suggest that the storm Laing depicts is a judgement by God, a form of retribution for past crimes against nature. She is not suggesting a directly interventionist God in this sense. Whatever causes these storms remains firmly off-camera. But the heavens have always been the symbol of what is not known, what cannot be controlled by us, what remains forever out of reach. They are that place where the future is born, the heavens stand for the fate that more and more seems to be approaching and also for the slim possibility that something may arise before this to save us.
 

Rosemary Laing is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Galerie Lelong, New York, and Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorff.

 
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the full article in the Winter 2007 issue of Art & Australia.