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Cassandra Laing
It will all end in stars
1 - 24 March, 2007
By Chris Beck
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Themes of impermanence, evolution and extinction roll around in Cassandra Laing’s head, informed by life, circumstance, science and films. Sitting in her studio with large works on paper and a solitary snapshot of Jodi Foster clipped to the wall, Cassandra talks busily about the topics that inform her art.
"I’ve painted about Antarctica and astronomy in the past. I’m also interested in natural history, genetics and evolution in themselves and as metaphors for my family history."
Last year Cassandra quit her job to concentrate on art. Soon after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment. Her sister and grandmother died after contracting the disease.
"I experience the loss of people close to me as an extinction. When you lose one person, I use it as a metaphor for an entire species because people are individual; they are irreplaceable."
The thought of mixing paint, with its fumes and complexities was discouraging and Cassandra found comfort in the simple monochrome of graphite. She had been drawing large-scale epic drawings since art school.
"One of my favourite artists is Vija Celmins. She does massive star scapes and surfaces of the oceans and, unlike most artists, she is known for her drawing… I’d come into the studio rugged up with my beanie on in winter, and all I could manage to pick up was a graphite stick. I didn’t want to have to think too much."
Cassandra also made little sculptures. She was reading Richard Dawkins’ 'The Ancestor’s Tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of life', which explores the animal species linked to humans as she replicated the charm bracelets that she and her sister wore as children.
"I wanted to make charms that told a story about evolution – chain of being, circle of life, silver links."
Her ideas about existence have also been stimulated by fantasy. The concept of transformation and change came from Carl Sagan’s book Contact (also a film starring Jodie Foster) with its themes of isolation, loss and the future of the human race. And the vulnerability of the androids in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner touched a chord.
"My work is not pure landscape or in response to field trips and it isn’t straight representation of the world around me, so it’s the inner journey stuff I suppose, for want of a better word."
Drawings of origami dinosaurs that she shaped from pages of a dictionary, monkeys, bracelets, a photo of Cassandra and her sister, a finch Darwin brought back from the Galapagos Islands invent metaphors on paper that form a personal and universal meaning.
Her post-graduate mentor, Melbourne painter Charles Green, referred to the drawings as trompe l’oeil, a French term literally meaning "that which deceives the eye."
"I wanted to have the tension between something really sharply drawn and this image behind that informs the drawing but it kind of hovers."
By Chris Beck
writer and photographer
List of awards and career highlights:
• Fifth solo show at helengory galerie, Melbourne in March 2007
• Currently enrolled in a studio-based PhD at the University of Melbourne
• Exhibiting in Voiceless: I Feel Therefore I Am, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, February 2007
• 2006 finalist in National Art Awards including:
Dobell Prize for Drawing, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton
Conrad Jupiters Art Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Gold Coast
Tidal: City of Devonport Art Award, Devonport Regional Gallery, Tasmania
New Social Commentaries ’06, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool
Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, South Australian Museum, Adelaide
• Winner (joint) of Churchie Emerging Art Award, Brisbane, 2006
• Winner of People’s Choice Award in Banyule Works on Paper Award, Melbourne, 2005
• Bundanon Artist in Residence, New South Wales, 2004
• Winner Commendable Oil Prize, R & M McGivern Art Prize, Maroondah Art Gallery, 2003
• Finalist Darebin-La Trobe Acquisitive Art Prize, Bundoora, 2003
• Winner of the inaugural University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association (UMPA) Art Prize, 2002
• Graduated from Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) Hons, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1992
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