Deborah Hally

Deborah Hally is another emerging artist who hails from the (Upper) Hunter, and whose work reveals the limitations and liberations of a rural existence. Studying for a Diploma of Fine Arts at Newcastle TAFE has taken Deborah a number of years, the practical limitations of a relative ‘tyranny of distance’. In her long gestation for study and producing work, however, she has had time to develop, to play with new media and settle on new preferences. About 18 months ago, she first started using photomedia after years of painting.

Photomedia could be seen to be the ‘easier’ medium of the two, the predilection of bright ‘young’ art things eager to make their ready-made mark both on paper and a photograph-hungry public. All the more competition then, image-wise, to have your photo spark a memorable exchange. True to her origins, Hally’s photographs are imbued with the craft of the constructed picture. ‘All my images begin as drawings’, she reveals, ‘where I work out practical concerns such as composition and lighting. Props and costumes are also an important part of this work and I sometimes spend a long time searching for the ‘right’ thing – something that looks just how I have imagined it.’

The sense of theatre, the imagined world writ large, is a recurring feature of Halley’s photographs. So too is the penchant for a feminine-lush tableau, much in the vein of Deborah Paauwe; the ‘lesser-known’ artist tapping into the same zeitgeist rather than a derivative conceit. Halley turns to cinema, music and books for her artistic inspiration as well as ‘some of the inspiring teachers I have studied with’ (at Newcastle Art School) – kind words from a mature age student.

‘With The Kingdom, I was trying to evoke a sort of uncomfortable nostalgia, and to play with ideas of innocence and corruption of innocence’, says Hally of this intriguing work, a dreamy study in stripes as much as the circus of identity. ‘I am searching and learning to express something about the emotional and psychological landscape we all inhabit’: an admirable kind of ‘survivalism’.