Rosemary Laing is a Brisbane-born and Sydney-based photomedia artist. Since the early 1980s she worked in concept-based series that engage with the politics of place and contemporary culture, exhibiting her work in Australia and overseas. Laing’s work is notable for its cinematic qualities, in which reality is often suspended in dreamlike narratives and staged scenarios, created through real-time performance and physical installation rather than digital manipulation. Laing’s projects are often created in relation to culturally and historically significant locations throughout Australia. Her 2004 series to walk on a sea of salt features images of places that have complicated associations with the idea of home in Australia, including the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in South Australia.

Laing moved to Sydney in 1990 to undertake postgraduate studies at Sydney College of the Arts and the College of Fine Art. She became fascinated by the machinations of air travel while living under the flight path in Leichhardt, Sydney in 1994. Working with Qantas, she produced a series, brownwork in 1997 and a video, spin in 1998. Flight research 1999, and the bulletproofglass series that followed in 2002, which placed the female body in suspension between heaven and earth in a careful staging and choreographing of constructed realities that toyed with photography’s relation to truth.

Laing was awarded an Australia Council Visual Arts Fellowship in 2009 and was recognised at the 35th Higashikawa Awards for her photographic achievements in 2019. She continues to engage with the entwinement of culture, history and environment in the Australian landscape in large scale works that address climate change, weather patterns and ecology. Laing has exhibited extensively in Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA. She has participated in Biennales (Adelaide, Busan, Istanbul, Sydney, Venice) and presented several solo museum exhibitions (Australia, Denmark, Japan, Spain, USA).