Buddens finds Rosemary Laing returning to Shoalhaven, New South Wales, the landscape of the iconic series groundspeed (2001). Laing's choice of location for Buddens is deeply felt. This is where she has worked regularly and it is a place of refuge. The familiarity is important as she considers her own relationship to place and the overlays of culture.
One part of this series has the wooden skeleton of a roof truss half buried in a hillock adjacent to the river. The romantic notion of sanctuary in nature is exploded by a made structure which can shelter no one given it is unclad and the orientation not practical.
The other part replaces the river flow with that of used, red-toned clothes. Red is the colour of both fire and flesh, and Laing has used its tones regularly, signifying life as much as death.
Hundreds of discarded yet still embodied items mimic the water that has bubbled up inland, depositing jumbles of debris on its banks when in flood. The purposeful nature of the water and the old clothes becomes a metaphor for any massed movement, the details of its passing and what is left behind.
– Adapted from text written by Judy Annear, an independent writer and curator.
Press release courtesy Tolarno Galleries.
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