brumby mound #6

Curator insights - Australian galleries

Since the 1980s, Rosemary Laing has explored the power of photography to invoke and unravel assumptions about landscape and place. In her series one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape, Laing responds to the desert as a place of belonging for traditional land owners and also a place of ‘unbelonging’ for the many non-Indigenous people who have failed to adapt to its challenging conditions. Laing’s interventions into this landscape are informed by its history of human encounters and powerful symbolic presence in the Australian psyche. In 'brumby mound #6', she alludes to tensions between the global and local, generic and specific, familiar and strange, through the enigmatic act of camouflaging ordinary home furnishings within a panoramic vista.