It will all end in stars: A tribute to Cassandra Laing

Every couple of weeks or so I eat my lunch in the lounge in the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne. I do this, not because of the comfortable couches but because on the wall, just above the old fire-place is a pastel drawing by Cassandra Laing who died in September, 2007 after a two year battle with breast cancer. She was only 39 years old and her artwork was only just beginning to receive critical acclaim and prominence.

I met Cassie when we were both undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1990. I remember Cassie as the student whose large-scale, complex and intriguing charcoal drawings took up much of the wall of her studio space. I later knew her as a friend I could call upon to assist in reading drafts of my ARC proposals as she worked in the Research office at Melbourne University. I often saw her on campus and we would talk about art, her PhD (which she didn't complete) and the fact that her sister had died of breast cancer two years before. The last time we spoke, she'd just got off her bike and was removing her helmet. Last images will always remain. I remember thinking as I saw her pale skin face and half-smile, that something wasn't right. When I asked, she looked down at the ground and simply said 'I hope I'm OK'. She smiled and we chatted about other things, such as the fact that she was happy that she was spending much of her time drawing.

Every time I look at this drawing I see something different - although the sphere constantly absorbs me. Is it an alien space-craft that has drawn the children to its side? It is the metal ball, that Dr. Ellie Arroway(Jodi Foster) travels in to the Vega star system? Is it a cell with DNA marker, rendering her and other family members susceptible to cancer?

Yesterday, as I sat and looked at the children, whose images, might have been, but are not reflected in the shinny surface of the orb, I remembered one particular summer when I was a child. Heat haze of a Wangeratta sky, the long grass, the constant shrill sound of cicadas that filled the air, my sisters and I wearing freshly pressed tee-shirts and shorts, waiting restlessly for the sun to go down so that we could go to the drive-in theatre. The slow drive back home in the cool air and leaning my head outside the car window so that I could look up at the stars.

Although this drawing could be inspired or copied from a photograph of Cassandra as a child playing with her friends, I prefer to think of it as pure fantasy. Cassie liked the science-fiction film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) and for her last exhibition - It will all end in stars, she had a solitary snapshot of Jodi Foster pinned to her studio wall. I think this drawing describes (as it does in the film Contact) a physical, emotional and spiritual journey and it will continue to inspire me as Cassie did.