The life-world

Janet Laurence

A 1 Hour Television Special

Janet Laurence has created a series of groundbreaking artworks in Australia, Japan and the U.K. and is now considered to be Australia's most exciting and innovative Public Artist. Creating 'experiential passageways' she investigates the world in which we live, exploring what is important about a particular place and our deep personal relationship with that place or idea. She is one of a small group of Australian artists producing large scale installation artworks that have given new meaning to our cities and to the words Public Art in Australia.

Janet has created unique environmental artworks for the Olympic site at Homebush Bay ('In the Shadow') ; 'The Edge of the Trees' for the Australian Museum in Sydney's CBD; 'The Veil of Trees' at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, The Domain Sydney; 'Stilled Lives' for the Melbourne Museum; 'The Breath We Share' for the Myers Centre, Sydney; 'The Elizir Bar' in Japan and 'The Australian War Memorial' in Hyde Park, London.

She is now working on 'The CH2 Building in Melbourne', the most environmentally intelligent building to have been built in any Australian city.

Janet's work is both risky and dangerous. Her brief is to come up with an idea which will create special meaning and a unique sense of place.

Working as the artist on a team which frequently includes architects and landscape architects, she researches what is special about a place and then dreams up an idea, creating an environment where secret information that is normally hidden to us, gets revealed like an X-Ray.

Her ideas are intensely visual and her imagination extreme. Her ideas are bold and playful, often involving skilled technicians making forms that have never been seen or made before. The construction of these complex artworks may have been commissioned by large corporations, city councils, arts bodies or a village in Japan ...... but for Janet, it all begins in the studio.

Janet's studio is an artist's laboratory. Working as a modern day alchemist, she experiments with materials transforming matter from the mundane to the extraordinary.

"I rapidly turn each of my studios into a collecting space where I have a lot of things going on at once. I have this strange collection of things, substances, elements, growing things and specimens. Crystals grow over plates, copper palettes go green over a year and amazing fungus grows on shelves. I like that. I like these organic processes that happen and my studio is the place for it."

" I'm very interested in how we are connected to the web of the world, how our bodies bleed out into the world. All my work has really been about the relationship that people have with the living world that we are a part of. From very early on, I decided that what was different about Australia from anywhere else, was that we have a life that is strongly entwined with our natural environment and I wanted to bring that out in my work, so I made a conscious decision to make artworks that were about relating to our environment."

Small in stature and emotionally highly tuned, Janet has an imagination and determination which has led her from one success to the next. In all her artworks, she's been the rock on which major works have been created. Her artworks are amongst the most accessible and public of any artist in Australia and make her a serious candidate for the title 'Australia's leading Public Artist'.

20 years ago, 'Installation Art' was dismissed by critics as a new lightweight often irrelevant artform made by people who hadn't studied sculpture. Today it is the fastest growing of all visual artforms and is responsible for remarkable sculptural works which have given new meaning to our experience of 'living in the city'.

I have filmed Janet during the making of many of her major artworks and ive been constantly amazed how her openess is challenged daily by the situations and obstacles she encounters. Her creative intuition walks a tightrope through these obstacles and it is this remarkable sense of vulnerability and strengh that I have tried to capture on film.

The dramatic structure of this film will be progressive revelations which reveal what is at stake for artist Janet Laurence. At the same time, it will be a film about looking through an artists eyes and mind, and entering into the creative process inside Janets head as she creates remarkable 'memory spaces' which we are invited to share.

Contact us: info@coolamonmedia-australia.com