2020-shortlisted

Tajette O’Halloran – In Australia

By February 10, 2021 No Comments

In Australia began as a self portrait series while on a road trip heading home to the Northern Rivers for Christmas. The series was originally titled Christmas time; Australia and emerged as an investigation into the celebratory expressions of Australians during this holiday, particularly in small regional towns. This time of year has always felt desolate and anticlimactic and the feelings associated with a small town summer Christmas mirrored much of my years growing up and hanging around in Lismore, NSW as a teenager. As the images emerged I knew there was more to these themes that I wanted to explore and felt a strong impulse to expand the series. In Australia is an unveiling of the idle facade of suburbia exposing the complex and intimate threads that bond communities together.

Tajettes In Australia series has emerged from her fascination with the complexity and weight of intimate relationships, in particular the meaningful yet destructive threads that hold communities together in small town and suburban settings. 

In this body of work Tajette uses constructed realities to explore the psyche of Australias suburbia, where intimacy and hope languish against an atmosphere of idleness, apathy and stillness.

Signifying the anticlimactic closure of the day, the images are set predominately at dusk where undesignated identities appear in bleak isolated landscapes to conjure a sense of listlessness. The work is a significant recollection of Tajettes profound adolescence growing up in the Northern Rivers of NSW.

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