Janet Laurence's inspiring environmental installation

Laurence, Janet. 2016. Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef. Installation. The Aesthetics of the Undersea: Routledge.

Elizabeth Cole, screen shot of images from the ARC ONE website for the installation Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef 2016.

This work takes the form of a quasi-scientific/medical installation, set up to care for ailing reef.

Janet Laurence is a highly regarded Australian environmental artist, as evidenced by the many awards and accolades listed on her website. While having seen her work over the years at her Melbourne gallery, ARC ONE, it was only when I started to research environment artists for my current Studio 2 work that I fully appreciated both the aesthetics of her work and their intended affect.

A chapter reviewing her work Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef 2014 in the publication The Aesthetics of the Undersea (Cohen and Quigley 2019) reinforced this for me. The text included the observation that Laurence intends for her installations to prove that an aesthetic encounter can disrupt climate change blindness (Cohen and Quigley 2019, 191). In this regard Laurence has adopted the view of Giles Deleuze, that art address problems through sensation and affect (Grosz 2008).

However, as exemplified by this installation, Laurence creates order from chaos (Emmett 1998, 11) to construct new realities (Hickey-Moody 2013, 85), and thereby open our eyes.

This works remind me of the power of aesthetic affect.

Bibliography:

• Cohen, Margaret, and Killian Quigley. 2019. The Aesthetics of the Undersea. 1st ed.Routledge Environmental Humanities Series. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

• Emmett, Peter. 1998. Janet Laurence.An Art in Australia book. Sydney, N.S.W: Craftsman House [distributor].

• Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.Wellek Library lectures. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Hickey-Moody, Anna. 2013. "Chapter 4 Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics ad Affective Pedagogy." In Deleuze and research methodologies edited by Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose, 79-95. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, United Kingdom).