Up close with Janet Laurence
About Janet Laurence
Born 1947 in Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Sydney
In paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations, photography and architectural interventions, Janet Laurence has examined the hybridity of natural and built environments, with a deft transformation of materials that recalls alchemy. Ideas of nature, science, history, transformation and memory are explored with poetic and thoughtful sensibility and profound ecological understanding. WAITING – A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants (2010) is a site-specific medicinal garden that continues her investigation of threatened environments within the framework of the metaphor of medicine. It takes the form of a built structure echoing the glasshouses and mazes that can be found in botanic gardens. Laurence has created here a space of revival and resuscitation – a sickbay for fragile plants. Using glass and mirrored stainless steel, this sanatorium for flora is a playful addition to the gardens with the real intent of amplifying the concerns and urgency of threats to our physical habitat.