Rosemary Laing’s 'Aristide' is from her 2010 series Leak, for which she organised the construction of a suburban house frame on a sheep farm in the Cooma–Monaro district of southern New South Wales. Like many rural areas around Australia, the historic farmlands of this district are being slowly encroached upon by suburban development. The title of the series refers to this ‘leakage’ of population into landscape and of past into present. Laing has installed the domestic armature into the pastoral landscape to suggest an incongruous collision or hybrid anomaly.
Aristide is the name of a character in Patrick White’s novel The Twyborn affair (1979). Like this photograph, White’s novel is set in the Cooma–Monaro region, and shares Laing’s interest in identity, politics and the juxtaposition of contemporary ideas with historical nostalgia.
(2014)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
