After Nature
After Nature —
1 March – 10 June 2019 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 140 George Street The Rocks NSW mca.com.au
“A major artist, Laurence’s burgeoning international reputation is underpinned by her significant oeuvre in multiple media, working across sculpture, installation, photography and video.”
The starting point for Janet Laurence’s photographic series (2012) was her carefully positioned “camera trap” (exhibited at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2000) provided my introduction to her work. For that exhibition, she raided Melbourne Museum’s taxidermy collections. Large mammalian species, shrouded in protective sheeting, were juxtaposed with vitrines filled with the “skins” of tiny birds, whose eye sockets stuffed with cotton wool could be interpreted as a metaphor for human blindness to the complexity of the natural world. These tableaux heralded her continuing interest in museology, charting how approaches to displaying natural history have evolved. Since then she has created installations in natural history museums in countries around the world, notably during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. In 2017, her presentation on her work at an academic symposium at the Berlin Natural History Museum was rapturously received. Sitting at the intersection of artistic enquiry and scientific research, her work is well known and often cited by younger artists as inspirational.
