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.“Off the Wall” Art Melbourne 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.

Ashley Crawford, Melbourne-based art critic, author and

commentator.

“Paper Walls” Pod Space, Newcastle, 2008

Deborah Hally deals with a cognate sense of loss in many teasing images. The fingers of gloves are knotted together, toys are outgrown, painted fingernails represent the past and the present.

Jill Stowell, art critic, Newcastle Herald

“ArtReview.com”

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.

Laura McLean-Ferris, independent curator and critic, and a

regular contributor to ArtReview magazine

*”The Kingdom”, 2008