AG-S Like Gina, Janet Laurence's experience of alchemy is intertwined with plants.
Janet Laurence I'm Janet Laurence. I'm a contemporary artist based in Sydney, and I work with the lives of plants and alchemy and have done so for over 30 years. I find it a very enduring area to be involved in.
AG-S Janet first encountered alchemy as a young artist studying in Italy.
JL We had to make our own pigments from ground up substances. And of course, it was a very alchemical thing of then making paint and then paint that starts to form images. And so, this matter of the world starts to create meaning, as it were. I really got into alchemy. And so, it became the subject of my work as well as very slowly, it was being embodied as a language. And for a long time, I was working with that idea of transformation of matter and finding meaning in that in itself.
AG-S Understanding alchemy changed the way Janet related to the world around her.
JL I'm a great one for being in a garden at night. And I absolutely love this whole relationship between certain insects and plants and all of these things that happen and the extraordinary events of flowers and so on. It's just mystical. And it gives you such a sense of wonder. And yet it seems like this deep pattern that's creating all of this, and it all seems to interconnect with everything. There's just so many ways that alchemy reappears in our life. I make these elixir labs where we drink the juice of plants in order to have a transformation. But that also takes us into the world of the plants. We invite the plants into us. Alchemy then becomes this way of us being totally interconnected into nature around us.
AG-S I was thinking about how things are entangled and interlinked and how alchemy really is in the doing of Janet's work. I asked Janet and Gina if they could respond to this quote from a 1917 journal entry by Hilma af Klint, which was included in the catalogue for The Botanical Mind. ‘Firstly, I shall try and understand the flowers of the earth shall take as my starting point, the plants of the world. Then I shall study with equal care that which is preserved in the waters of the world. Then it will be the blue ether with all its various animal species. And finally, I shall penetrate the forest, shall study the moist moss of the trees of the forest and all the animals that dwell among the cool dark messes of the trees.’
GB-M So, Hilma af Klint, many people may now know her work. She's become very well known as an important figure in abstraction and in modernism, but she was largely unknown for many, many years and actually didn't want her work to be seen. She felt that it was what she was conveying in the work was too profound for people to understand in her time. So, she wanted the work to be seen later, and it was prophetic in many ways. Like some of her, her artwork depicted the blitz of World War II. She was an extraordinary person. The way in which her work is about a kind of communion with nature harnessing or appreciating the patterns and the abstract forms within nature; how nature is both intelligent and intelligible; it speaks in its own language; it speaks with symbols and patterns.
As Janet was describing so beautifully, one enters into it with a sense of wonder and attuned to its ways, to its rhythms, to its patterns. It can really speak to you. And I suppose some people might describe that as a form of mysticism, really. And I think that, you know, it's not incidental that so many, what are referred to as sort of outsider or self-taught artists like Hilma af Klint, was often sort of associated with those kinds of artists. That they are drawn to vegetable motifs or plant motifs because there is this just really sort of yeah, bedazzling way that plants behave and display their characters. And there's definitely a real magic there.
