After Nature: Interview with Janet Laurence

How did the natural world become such a central feature of your work? 

I spent a lot of my childhood in nature by the mere fact that I grew up in an area of Sydney that was semi-rural. I had a horse that took me on adventures, but I didn’t think that much about it then. Later, I had a lot of experiences going into the country in far Western Queensland and seeing the other side of nature: the droughts and the difficulties on the land. Really, I became conscious of wanting to use our nature, in Australia, when I was living overseas. I wanted to come back and explore our natural world because I think it’s very particular.

Over the past decade, your art has adopted a more overtly activist tone. You have even described yourself as being on an “ecological quest” through your work. Was there a specific turning point where you became politicized?

[In the early 2000s] I was invited to Chiapas, Mexico, where I saw them cutting down the forest, which is the beginning of the Amazon. I realized, through the indigenous peoples we were talking to, that their whole livelihood was gone; there were enormous ramifications socially and environmentally of this destruction. I decided I wanted to focus on very threatened areas. This specific event made me realize that this was happening everywhere. My next trip was to our own Styx Forest [in Tasmania], which I saw being plundered. 

How does the overarching idea of care weave itself into your work?

I was always interested in the intimate experience of things in nature; never really in making the big picture, or a single iconic image of our landscape. I was more interested in entering into and looking at what was happening inside nature. This makes you much more intimate with things and it has a natural demand for you to be very careful; it just brings that about with it, or it did for me. Then I thought about how to bring people into seeing these things that are happening and, through empathy, to understand how it must feel for these plants. 

How do you bring your viewers into your work? 

I am always aware of wanting to create quite a sensory space that you enter into. In making an installation, I’m aware of wanting to bring people into it; I don’t want people to just be repelled by its message. I want to bring them in to engage with it and if they get the message, that’s great, but it is a type of lure in a way. The word for aesthetics in Greek [aisthetikos] is “sensory,” the sensory space, and I have always used that idea as a way to give people pleasure. That way they spend more time looking at and engaging with something. When people slow down and take the time to look, I think things become more memorable; you recognize in yourself what you are feeling. I believe that it then becomes a memory, a sense of memory—it is the opposite to just sensation. 

The use of veiling has featured in your work since the late 1990s and also appears in your new work at the MCA, Theatre of Trees (2018–19). Can you tell us more about this installation?

I just knew that when I had that big space [a large, double-height space on the ground floor of the MCA], I wanted to create a forest in there somehow. I wanted something big and tall in that space and I had to think about how I could create that experience. I have worked a lot with big, transparent veils in various ways. It’s funny because they are the opposite to the solidity of trees. I did a lot of experimenting but because I have worked with veils I could imagine the experience of walking among them.

In making Theatre of Trees I decided that each veil was an individual tree, but they are all slightly layered—you see one through the other, like you do in a forest, really. The hanging veils are photographs that I have printed onto watercolor paper. I painted over and re-photographed them [and then printed onto silk and mesh]. So they are quite dissolved images, with usually just a focus on one part of the tree because the space is dark you don’t quite pick it all up. The images go up close and intimately look at these trees. There are some photographs of the Tarkine in Tasmania, but a lot of the photographs are from different parts of the world, [including] Bath in Somerset, Sicily, and the Dandenongs [in Victoria], where there are beautiful eucalypts. A lot of the videos [in the installation] are from there too because they are such tall, amazing trees. 

In the corners, I wanted to have these little detailed stories about plants and trees. In some ways they are like the little cottages at the edge of the forest, places you go into and think about the different aspects of plants. There is a library, a herbarium, and the Elixir Lab, which is to do with the medicinal value of plants and involves performances where you taste the plant samples. 

Our current epoch has been dubbed the Anthropocene, which denotes the extreme influence of humans on the Earth since the Industrial Revolution. What is the role of the artist in addressing the problems of our era?

I think in Australia, artists aren’t really credited for the knowledge they carry through all the research and work they do. It is very timely now to listen to artists because scientists are muffled—so many people are. The situation is getting quite extreme; I feel it is a very important time for the arts in general to speak. Artists are the ones who are still free to speak because they don’t belong to institutions that prevent them from speaking. I think art can reach people in much more emotional ways than all the data and information can—more emotively, more playfully, poetically, and in more obtuse, engaging and memorable ways. Politicians know how powerful art can be.