Study template: Christo & Jeanne-Claude

Chriso & Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf wrapped, Paris, 1975-85.

Vivid Festival Sydney 2012 – projectedImages onto MCA building. The festivalruns for 3 weeks annually.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped coast, one million square feet, Australia 1968 - 69

Antony Gormley, Asian Field, Biennale of Sydney 2006

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Valley Curtain, Colorado 1970-72

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Utah 1970

Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, New Mexico USA, 1977

JMW Turner, Snowstorm - steam boat off a harbour's mouth, 1842

POSTMODERN FORMS 3 – JANET LAURENCE

Janet Laurence, b. 1949 Aust. In the shadow, site specific installation Homebush Bay, 2000

Laurence is a contemporary artist who works across a wide range of media including painting, photography and sculpture. She is probably best known for her site-specific installations such as In the shadow, an installation involving a 100 metre length of a creek at Homebush Bay in 2000. It was created especially for the Sydney Olympics. Unlike many installations, this one is now a permanent part of the landscape.

Laurence has a specific message to convey. She is very concerned with environmental issues, and all her work is involved with engaging an audience and getting them to reflect upon this. Many of her works are actually acting to rehabilitate an area or a group of plants, whilst being artworks as well. So they have a double function: it’s not just something for people to look at. It’s engaging with the world in a particular way, a more politically active way than say, Christo & Jeanne-Claude or Goldsworthy.

In the shadow, 2000, details

Laurence is also interested in memories of places and peoples, and the concept of change. We can see this in another work of hers. Edge of the Trees is an installation in collaboration with Australian artist Fiona Foley, in the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney. This consists of column structures of steel, sandstone, and timber.

Edge of the trees, 1995, sandstone, wood, steel, oxides, shells, honey, bones, zinc, glass, sound, 29 pillars

The work lists names of indigenous people from the Eora tribe from the early days of white settlement. They are engraved on sandstone, upon which the Sydney harbour area is built, and which was the material for the colonial buildings.

Timbers which originally grew on the Museum site were used, in early days, to build a foundry for the colony in Sydney. The timbers were salvaged from that building in the 1990s and ‘re-planted’ back at the Museum site for this installation. They were engraved with names of fruits and flowers from the Colonial Governor’s Garden, in Latin and in indigenous language. Steel structures are also included, designed to rust red into the sandy ground in which they are embedded. Names of First Fleet passengers are also included, engraved on zinc panels and fastened to the poles.

Coming from within the installation are a continuous sound recording of voices. They murmur quietly, you have to struggle to catch them. They are Koori names of places which were colonised by the British. The effect is that the voices sound like ghosts.

Edge of the trees, detail.

There are steel and glass structures as well, which contain material such as rock oxides, bone, shells and ash, which would have been from the indigenous campsites around the area. The structure is reminiscent of burial poles, where the bones of a deceased person are, after the flesh is gone, put into the pole as the final part of a funeral ceremony.

“I’m interested in our interconnection and dependency on this environment and our own implication in its despoliation and loss. My concern has been the loss of habitat and resultant destruction of ecosystems and tragic decimation of species.” Janet Laurence, 2010, MCA Website for ‘In the balance: art for changing world’ exhibition, 2010.

RESOURCES‘A hospital for plants: the healing art of Janet Laurence’, in Art & Australia, Vol. 48 No. 1 2010, p.p. 64-67.

Janet Laurence’s website: http://www.janetlaurence.com/

Museum of Contemporary Art Education Kit: http://www.mca.com.au/media/uploads/files/ITB_Education_Kit_v3.pdf

Sydney Olympic Park Public Art: http://www.sopa.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/475309/fact_sheet_COMMU_Public_Art02.pdf