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Alchemy. I started to think about alchemy and the magicking of base metals into gold, and somehow it seemed too eighties, too crass for Rosemary Laing - too much like Julian Schnabel turning broken plates and scumbled pigment into the sort of money the big end of town would drool over. Rosemary Laing's work is more poetic, more intelligently feminine, more lasting in terms of the way it changes you forever, and for the better. Her work is about the poetics of transformation rather than the get-rich-quick greed of alchemy.
I have admired Laing's work for a long time. When I heard the title of her latest exhibition, Groundspeed, I at first thought about aeroplanes - perhaps catapulted into take-off and rising for the skies. I also thought of another series in which brides in starched wedding dresses hovered like clouds in the blue distance.
Then I saw the new work in the gallery and realised the title referred to the computer generated floral carpets she had rather prettily cut-and-pasted into an overgrown woodland landscape. Then Gitte Weise rushed past, remarking as she went - and as she has probably had to do throughout the run of the show: 'They are real carpets, you know'.
'Of course', I lied. 'Very well done. I'm sure some people think they are computer generated.'
Now it was time for a good hard look. What Laing has so painstakingly done is to give us the reverse of trompe l'oeil - she has fooled our eyes into thinking that what we are looking at is fabricated rather than real. Not only has she laid the carpet in the forest and sprinkled it with leaves