Janet Laurence, After Nature Review

Recently I went to see the Janet Laurence, After Nature, exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, a major survey of her work.

The first room I investigate houses her installation, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, and I'm engulfed by a smell of the sea, briny and sea-weedy. Deep Breathing features vitrines of re-purposed museum exhibits, shells on petri dishes, bleached white coral, the spines of small creatures. Videos of the Barrier Reef screen on two walls, depicting sculptural amoeba, sea flowers, sea slugs and many species I can’t name.

Walking through this room, I have to dodge photographers, while I take photos myself. Art

students take notes, while I take notes too.

From Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef

Red threads and tubes of life support, glass jars, retorts, alembics, hard hearts, white coral bronchial branches. An amalgam of organic fossilised animals, once living combined with the artifice of science, a museum of lost things, creatures on hospital life support. A decomposition into mineral elements leaching into a rainbow of chemical colours.

The floor with its reflected light-shadows is like an ocean. A group of young school children run into the space and begin dancing in front of the sea world projected onto the walls. ‘Wow, Nemo!’ a boy cries at the sight of clown fish emerging from the fingers of sea anemones. ‘I want to be a fish,’ another one cries. They run back and forth in front of the videos, creating fish shadows with their hands on top of the fish and other sea creatures.

Next I look at Cellular Gardens (Where Breathing begins). This artwork features endangered rainforest plant species embedded in a forest of glass receptacles, linked via a vein-work of glass tubes. I wonder where the young saplings in their alembics will go once the exhibition is over. Will the exhibition continue elsewhere or will the plants be transplanted back into nature to continue as a new forest? Will they miss each other if separated?

Solids by Weight Liquids by Measure from the Periodic Table series, consists of squares of various types of metal mounted in strips, patterned with chemical reactions, symbols and formulas. I hear a man talking near me in a language I don’t recognise, as if he’s reading out the alchemical formulas etched into the oxidised panels. I imagine him being affected by the symbolic incantation and undergoing a mental transformation.

I move on to Forensic and take a photo of one of Janet Laurence’s photos, photos of photos creating new photos of infinite reflections.

From Forensic

I enter the darkened cube-like space of Vanishing, a nine-minute video filmed at Taronga Zoo where black and white-split screen footage of animal fur is projected on a wall. I sit on a bench to watch. The heavy breathing of sleeping carnivores fills the room. Tiger fur on one side, a bone claw reading up to touch dark fur on the other. Flanks, bellies, giraffe stripes, a gorilla, a bear. The sound of the raucous breathing evokes some kind of primal memory of danger in me and I wonder what it would be like to sleep in the vicinity of wild animals. A mirror on the opposite wall creates a disturbing tunnel effect as if this is a womb of fur, a giant marsupial pouch. I imagine the sleeping animals are dreaming of their viewers, the prey they’ll never reach. Or maybe they’re dreaming of escape.

From Vanishing

Heartshock (After Nature) is set up in the main space. It’s a mammoth eucalyptus tree, accompanied by a stuffed owl perched on a credenza high up on the wall. The tree was one that had already fallen at the Australian Botanic Garden, Mount Annan, decimated by drought. Scribbles of insects manuscript the bark, and chunks of quartz are attached like healing flowers. The tree’s extremities are wrapped in white bandages as if wounded, incorporated with glass tube extensions as if to repair the broken tree which can’t be revived.

From Heartshock (After Nature)

In Janet Laurence’s video accompanying the exhibition, she talks of how her art sometimes emerges from accidents, ‘Things happen.’ Her question is, ‘How do we live in a post-natural world?’ Nature has reached a tipping point where much of it needs human maintenance to survive. Janet Laurence’s artworks perform an alchemy on the viewer, the spark of the idea of the work itself combining with the ingredients of the exhibition and the other participants to create a new understanding in the viewer.

As I leave the space, I follow the group of school children I saw earlier, who were making fish shadows. A boy flaps his blue school jacket outwards as if he’s trying to fly.