Janet Laurence

Presented for PHOTO 2024, Janet Laurence’s world-premiere installation Tears of Dust transforms photography into an immersive, multisensory encounter with a changing planet. Its haunting wunderkammers (cabinets of curiosity) evoke breathing forests, extreme weather and dying glaciers, inviting reflection on ecological fragility, interconnected life and nature’s power to regenerate. Curated by Anouska Phizacklea.

Janet Laurence’s large-scale solo exhibition Entangled Garden for Plant Memory transformed three floors of Yu-Hsiu Museum into an immersive ecological garden organised around roots, leaves and habitats. Through video, living plants, specimens, minerals and laboratory glassware, the exhibition explored human–nature entanglement, species loss, regeneration and environmental empathy.

Janet Laurence: After Nature was the first major survey of one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Bringing together sculpture, installation, photography and video, the exhibition traced her ecological quest across three decades, exploring nature, science, memory and loss while revealing the interconnection and fragility of all living things. Curated by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent.

In The Matter of the Masters, Janet Laurence draws on Rijksmuseum conservation research into Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. A modular vitrine combines pigments, binders, botanical imagery and X-ray fluorescence scans, revealing the “physiology” of painting. Presented as an alchemical cabinet of curiosity, the work shows how plant and animal matter becomes art, entwining nature and culture.

Featuring more than 300 works from the NGV Collection, Photography: Real and Imagined explored photography as both document and invention—recording the world while constructing stories, identities and illusions. Spanning three centuries, the exhibition brought Australian and international artists into dialogue, including Janet Laurence and her expanded photographic practice.

Conceived for the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung, Janet Laurence’s The Burnt Sea transforms Alfred Ehrhardt’s historic coral photographs into floating silk veils animated by light and air. Ash-toned imagery, embroidery and a “reef hospital” of bleached coral evoke marine loss while holding open the possibility of care, healing and ecological renewal.

Created from Museum Koenig’s zoological archives, Janet Laurence’s site-specific Nach der Natur: Dem Gefährdeten und Verschwindenden brings taxidermy, scientific glass and museum specimens into a haunting meditation on extinction. Presented in the historic Festsaal, preserved animals become witnesses to fragile life and humanity’s place within the community of living things.

Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, After Eden transformed the gallery into a haunting theatre of suspended mesh chambers, projections, scientific glass and taxidermy specimens. Drawing on research at wildlife sanctuaries in Aceh and Sichuan, Laurence confronted extinction and habitat loss while asking how art might foster empathy, healing and care.