Deborah Hally

Deborah Hally’s background in painting coupled with her recent move into photography has brought a focus on narrative to her work. Winner of the Dungog show, both in the local and open categories, Deborah was also a finalist in the Muswellbrook Photographic Prize in 2007. Selected by the MCA ’s Elizabeth Ann McGregor for a highly commended in the Maitland Tertiary Art Prize Hally’s work will appear in Art Melbourne’s Off the Wall project 2008.

“Deborah Hally’s work is both whimsical and chilling, a strange palimpsest of circus and Armageddon. It is a still from a David Lynch film or Enid Blyton on acid. Beautiful and disturbing.”AC

Deborah Hally’s photographs of children are all faceless too – and children’s faces are especially well-guarded in the age of the all-seeing camera, particularly when there is a heightened fear of predators.

However it is the children themselves who obscure the faces in these works, rather than those blurry pixels that we have become accustomed, attaching them with a level of power and agency as they seem to control our gaze. This work of Hally’s in particular has a peculiar David Lynch feel to it. Are we looking into a tiny doll’s house. Is it a dream, is it a memory? The image conveys the sense that there is something of the realm of childhood that somehow escapes us as adults and becomes frightening. The child, or the memory might just slip behind the striped circus curtain into a strange, non-linguistic world inaccessible for grown-ups.
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Laura McLean-Ferris is an independent curator and critic, and a regular contributor to ArtReview magazine.