Janet Laurence has for two decades explored the properties of the natural world within her art. Laurence's practice is characterised by the incorporation of diverse media including glass, lead, ash, minerals, oxides, wax and fur. Increasingly produced in response to specific sites and environments, her sculptural and installation works sit comfortably within the parallel contexts of museological, architectural and environmental display.

Laurence's works make reference to organic and inorganic realms, and the slippage of one state into another. A long-standing interest in the interconnection of the living and non-living underpins the works, expressed alchemically by the transformation of matter into substance. Memory, history and perception form underlying themes, notions of material transformation paralleled by evocations of lived experience and the passing of time. As a metaphor for the ever-changing state of the world around us, Laurence's art is insistently ambiguous, its cool, sculptural presentation mediated by lingering traces of humanity.

The fluidity between opposing states such as light and darkness, opacity and transparency, forms another recurrent theme in Laurence's art. Large, semi-transparent veils of photographic film create architectural corridors through which viewers walk, their presence recorded in reflection and momentarily enmeshed within the imagery that surrounds them. The smearing and spillage of fluids and pigments onto glass and metal similarly creates a sense of disturbance and flux. Laurence's creation of experiential environments, focus upon the viewer as an active producer of meaning, suggests a coming together of different worlds and, with it, a holistic integration of art and life.

Recent projects by the artist extend ideas of alchemical transformation to explore the transition of nature into culture, via the natural history museum.1 As a site in which objects and specimens are ordered, classified and displayed according to prescribed taxonomical regimes, the natural history museum reveals as much about representation as it does about science or evolution. Laurence's exploration of museum collections, and her juxtaposition of animal and mineral specimens, reinforces the interconnectedness of all things at a molecular level.

Transpiration consolidates the ideas that the artist has developed in recent years, and forges a link between her exhibition-based practice and larger public commissions. An artistic mediation upon environmental phenomena and processes, the exhibition depicts the transpiration of water into vapor as a metaphor for elemental states in flux. References to solids and liquids, and abstracted images of water chemistry processes, permeate the installation. Evolving out of research towards recent environmental projects Ð cloud formations in Picture the Dark Side of the River 1999 for the Department of Environment, and water remediation strategies from In the Shadow 2000 at Homebush Bay Ð the exhibition fuses studio-based and public art practice within a wider ecological imperative.

Janet Laurence's art is sustained by the ongoing exploration of our relation to the living world. Transpiration offers an insight into the artist's working method, forming both a conceptual ground for the larger environmental projects and a 'museum of life' in miniature scale. Bringing together the themes and concepts that have shaped Laurence's practice over time, the exhibition proposes an individual response to the connecting patterns and sheer physical beauty of the world around us.

Rachel Kent, 2000

1 These include the exhibition Muses. Janet Laurence: artist in the museum, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, and major public commission Stilled Lives, Museum Victoria (both 2000).