a survey exhibition
Janet Laurence’s main preoccupation is with evanescence. A gentle war is played out in her work between permanence and ephemera, between stability and stasis. To some extent, it is the goal of all art to preserve matter or a moment in time, and to stay flux. The tension alive in Laurence’s work is her concentration on what is unpreservable, on what can neither be resolved nor steadied, on what it is difficult or impossible to remember. Despite or because of this, she has also been involved in memorial commissions (the tomb of the unknown soldier, Canberra, and more recently the Australian war memorial at Hyde Park in London). For Laurence, art is always a substitute for a certain unnamable quantity that is best embodied in real human striving as opposed to the material things that symbolise it. The survey exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University (ANU) was an opportunity to reflect on the many ways Laurence has applied herself to the untellable stories of humanity’s efforts at restitution from decay.
Trace/Efface, 1991, about halfway through the passage of the exhibition, provided an easy point of access to Laurence’s project, and testified to the consistency of her concerns for at least twenty years. A single, long unit of adjoined black frames, it was alternatively photographic images lodged within the framed recessions, and, in a narrower enclosure, packed ash, which looked like concrete. Amorphously abstract from a distance, closer inspection revealed the images to be landscapes, barely visible because effaced with chemicals intended to accelerate the aging process. Ash is matter as remnant prior to its absolute disappearance—what remains behind after disintegration. Here it became the