The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of Weather #12, a 2006 photograph by Australian artist Rosemary Laing. One in a series of staged shots and landscapes, the work evokes the recalcitrant power of nature, its newsprint tempest enveloping a woman head-over-heels. The full Weather series, along with Laing's preparatory drawings, are on display at Australia's Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney through September 7, as part of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, which brings more than 180 artists from 42 countries to eight venues.

Born in Brisbane in 1959, Laing currently lives and works in Sydney. Though trained as a painter, she has predominately worked in photography and performance art since the '80s. Her career has crisscrossed the globe: In 1999, she took part in the Melbourne-Osaka exchange between the Australian Center for Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, and in 2007, she participated in the Venice Biennale. Laing has exhibited across Australia, the US, Europe, and Asia, with recent shows at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee; Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf, Germany; and Galerie Lelong in New York. She is represented by Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne.

The women of the weather series are not the first Laing has captured in suspended free fall. Her flight research series from 1999 portrays brides descending through the heavens in various intrepid poses, their dresses seductively billowing. Fantastic yet straightforward, the images explore speed and movement with the sensibility of an Italian futurist painter. The 2002 bulletproofglass series returns to runaway brides, but this time the women have been shot like doves, dropping from above and smeared with their own gore. Joining the ranks of Turner and Monet as a student of the skies, Laing shares her staccato conception of movement with Eadward Muybridge's early photographs and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.
- Lauren McKee