Hayley Megan French

The Pipeline, 2018-2022

“The photograph is meant to be witness to something real. We take photographs to prove that something happened, that we were there, that we were young once. It is a documentary form. An archive. But of course the photograph can be an emotion as well. It can be an argument. A feeling. That’s what photographers like Henri-Cartier Bresson taught us anyway, when he changed the way we view photography by framing images of soldiers in the 1930s so that he captured their emotion, their pain, allowing him to make an argument about what was being seen rather than simply document what was there.

In painting over polaroids Hayley Megan French mostly erases those documentary and archival connotations. She draws our attention to the emotion of a photograph, it’s feeling, by replacing some of its detailed accuracy with the texture and essence of the suburban home: something very literal is elevated to metaphor.

In these images, I can see that the painting is a kind of thinking-work. I can picture French painting over these polaroids, a photographic form that implies something more flippant and less worthy of keeping over a long period of time than other forms of photography. I can imagine her painting slowly, carefully, and I can see in her brush strokes the moment where suburbia becomes, not just something she has captured in an image but a space where the imaginary, memory and desire collide.

These houses are in Guildford but they also represent a kind of ‘suburban everywhere.’ All suburbs have their own topography. Their own folklore, their own way of feeling them when you walk through them. They have negotiable spaces, closed spaces, things that no one knows about them, and we get that here: we are invited in on the joke, to smile at that local sign that reads ‘You will Feel Like You’re On a Tropical Island’ when you are so far from the sea or to notice the way that the path at the local park curves like a snake. These images are both an intense and a specific portrait of one time and place but they also speak to broader ideas about what suburbia means in the Australian imagination. A homogenous anti-intellectual space, the place we find belonging and safety. There is a recognition here of the signifying power and the political potential of specific places – the home, the suburb.”

Felicity Castagna, Notes on Suburbia, excerpt, Sydney Review of Books, 2021

2022

Toowoomba, QLD

Toogoolawah, QLD

2021

Guildford, NSW

Toowoomba, QLD

2020

Toowoomba, QLD

Guildford and surrounding suburbs, NSW

2019

Guildford, NSW

Kununurra, WA

2018

Guildford, NSW

All works are acrylic on Polaroid photograph, 9 x 11cm each, mounted on Tasmanian Oak

Publications

Robert Wood, Semaphore x Suburbs: Hayley Megan French in correspondence with Robert Wood, October 2019, Semaphore

Felicity Castagna, Notes on Suburbia, 2021, Sydney Review of Books

Hayley Megan French, The Pipeline, Series 1, 2021

Hayley Megan French, The Pipeline Reading List, ADSR Zine 017, September 2022, ed. Elia Bosshard & James Hazel

Acknowledgements

The photographs for this project have been taken on Darug land in Old Guildford and Guildford, NSW, Miriwoong country in Goonoonoorrang/Kununurra, WA, the land of the Giabal and Jarowair people in Toowoomba, QLD and on Jinibara land in Toogoolawah, QLD.

The Pipeline Kununurra polaroids were made at The Border Line in October 2019: Hayley Megan French at The Border Line

Thank you to my collaborator Alexandra Lawson for working with me on The Pipeline polaroids in Toogoolawah when I was unable to travel interstate in 2021. Alexandra visited Toogoolawah and took photographs on my behalf which were then posted to me to paint over in my studio in Sydney. I was able to return to Toogoolawah in early 2022 to continue the project.