Australian artist Janet Laurence has won the 2013 edition of the $40,000 Glover Prize for landscape painting, the richest annual prize for landscape painting in Australia. Chosen from 303 entries from Australian and overseas, Laurence’s winning entry “Plants eye view (The Tarkine, Tasmania)” is a spectacular two-panel multifaceted, multilayered duraclear, acrylic, dibond, and mirror painting that depicts threatened Tasmanian flora.  

A product of the artist’s continued exploration of our relationship with the environment, “Plants eye view (The Tarkine, Tasmania)” celebrates the unique and special botanical environment of the Tarkine Rainforest in Tasmania, one of the most threatened environments in the world that remains ecologically intact. Still unprotected by Australian heritage laws, the Tarkine Rainforest remains under threat from the mining and forestry industries.

“I am making propositions through works by creating spaces of perception that can bring us into contact with the ‘life-world.’ Our porous bodies breathe in and spill out into the world. To recognize this interdependence is the ecological undercurrent within my work,” explains Laurence in the catalogue for her exhibition “The Alchemical Garden of Desire.”

Exploring notions of art, science, imagination, memory, and loss, Janet Laurence’s practice examines the interconnection of life forms and ecologies and observes the impact that humans have on the threatened, natural world. Her practice has sustained organic qualities and a sense of transience, occupying the liminal zones, or places where art, science, imagination, and memory converge.

Janet Laurence is based in Sydney and exhibits widely nationally and internationally. Her work is represented in major Australian and international public, university, corporate, and private collections and was the subject of the film “The Life World,” by Richard Mordaunt, Coolamon Films for ABC television.