“Plants Eye View,” by eminent site-specific artist Janet Laurence, invites viewers to see the world holistically, roots and all. While staying at the Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary in the Kimberley, in her home country of Australia, the artist noticed within each walking stride a fresh pocket of the ecosystem. In this body of work, presented at the Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong, Laurence hopes to communicate what is organic and healthy for the landscape. Using her footprint as an intimate framing device, she gathers an array of indigenous plant life from the outback floor, carefully resting twigs and flowers on a sheet of gauze to be photographed, and then prints them onto clear acrylic panes.

Transposing the flora onto multiple transparent sheets is a means of layering “ways of seeing”—from experience, to camera, to print, to materiality. The work is a call for us to be aware of ourselves and of our impact on the land. The format also recalls the slides used in a lab to examine a specimen. As if under a microscope, flora in Bush Honey I and Ash and Pollen (2013) are blown out of scale. A process of holding plants up to a mirror and then photographing their reflection lends the images an otherworldly quality. This warp and separation might be read as an analogy for our mental and physical detachment from the land. At present, thousands of years of accrued knowledge of indigenous plant life in Australia are under assault from mining initiatives on the county’s most pristine areas of land. Laurence hopes to touch on the mistreatment, loss and mortality of the country’s landscape, with works that “bring you into it . . . reflect the world outside . . . fram[ing] it in a non-picturesque way.”

But despite these noble aspirations, in many ways the subdued works on show seem decorative and contained. In We Ring This Rock (2013) uprooted plant life is set against a burnt rock surface with an apocalyptic hue. One imagines hanging such imagery in a home—perhaps in the entry hall—as a nod to Australia’s future "red planet" status.

Perhaps this slip is felt more because Laurence’s past works were experiential while these appear to be an attempt at empiricism. In her previous installation work, Resuscitation Garden (For an Ailing Plant) (2011) she created a quasi-scientific environment where glass apparatuses nurtured a collection of stems and clippings. She even handed out “shots” of a natural elixir at the gallery. Here, Laurence entreated viewers to engage with plant life directly, while continuing the ongoing focus of her work on the question of what is native and on commonwealth practices that ignore the lore of the land. She wants to demonstrate the omnipotence of nature and the positive and negative implications of science and agricultural practices.

Through pigment and soil, Laurence hopes to bring the image back to its origins. Works such as Chlorophyll Conversation I and II and Kimberley Companions I (all 2013) certainly exhibit the artist’s deft use of both pigment and apparatus.  All in all, however, some of the ‘bio-dynamism’ of her previous installation work seems to have gone missing. Out of context, “Plants Eye View” feels instead much like a foreign introduction to an Australian artist’s particular ecology.

Plants Eye View by Janet Laurence is on show at the Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong, from September 26 to October 13, 2013.

• Hong Kong
• Australia