About us 
Janet Laurence, Glass Series, 2006
Janet Laurence's work for Match Box Friendship Wall & Match Box Gallery
Janet Laurence
Janet Laurence is a Sydney based artist, renowned for her site specific installations.
Janet has created a work for our Match Box Gallery/Friendship Wall, as well as a site specific installation for Influence Japan at Gosford Regional Gallery. Janet also generously hosted an afternoon in her studio for our Tokyo-Sydney Exchange Tour.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work for years has explored a poetics of space and materiality through the creation of specific works that deal with our experiential and cultural relationship with the natural world. Installations that extend from the museum/ gallery into the urban and landscape domain both ephemeral and permanent works that bleed between the architectural and the natural world that both physically and metaphorically dissolve these boundaries
Work for Friendship Wall/Match Box Gallery:
Glasshouse Series, 2006
This work is part of an ongoing series that as most of my work addresses our relationship to the natural environment. The botanical projects draw upon on scientific research and memory and lament the fragility, transience and vulnerability of our natural world.
The great botanical glasshouses have formed a basis for many works. These grand buildings that fulfilled the dream of creating ‘nature’ from distant lands under glass, they echo the wonder, conquest and exploitation of nature. Now empty many of these magnificent crystal structures are seemingly dormant apart from germinated wind blown seeds transformed into ghost glasshouses spectres of loss.
Installation created for Match Box Projects Influence Japan, Gosford Edogawa Commemorative Garden, 2007:
Verdant Residues, 2007
I am remembering the landscape of Japan, site of my work Elixir House in Nigata. There I created a space that immersed one into the botanical world of the surrounding landscape. Part apothecathy, part laboratory- juices from local medicinal plants created elixir drinks.
This all seems a distant verdant memory in the context of this surrounding Australian environment, which was recently ashen and blacken from raging bush fires. This has become the subject of my recent landscape and residues series.
I am thinking about the preciousness of regenerating growth and attempting to resuscitate and offer a life support system to our ailing environment.
Tokyo Geidai Exchange, 2006
Janet took part in our Sydney-Tokyo exchange program which involved us inviting 10 Tokyo Geidai (Tokyo National University fo Fine Arts and Music) Alumni, Staff and Post Graduate Students to join us and our peers in Sydney. Janet kindly toured us through her studio, and we viewed her works outside the Sydney Museum, in the Royal Botanical Gardens, and MCA Curator Russel Storer introduced us to her work in the MCA New Acquisitions exhibition.
Link
Janet Laurence is represented by:
BREENSPACE, Sydney, NSW
Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, VIC
Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, QLD
Gallerie Dusseldorf, Mosman Park, WA
Images © Janet Laurence and Match Box Projects
