Meg De Young & Gabrielle Hall-Lomax — Tactical Bodies
16 May 2025 — 15 June 2025
Meg De Young & Gabrielle Hall-Lomax, Finger Break, 2025.
Tactical Bodies is a collaborative, research-based project by Meg De Young and Gabrielle Hall-Lomax that explores how gendered expectations shape the ways women use their bodies. It began with shared reflections on how perceived threat influenced their movement through public spaces—affecting how they held themselves and navigated their surroundings. This awareness became a starting point for examining how these responses are conditioned and whether the body can unlearn them through self-defence practice
Using performative photography, the artists investigate how the body learns to respond to danger through repetition, rehearsal, and embodied experience. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender as repeated performance, Tactical Bodies considers how women are socialised into habits of caution and constraint— gestures that come to define femininity. The project questions how these ingrained patterns might be disrupted.
While women’s self-defence can effectively prevent violence and build confidence, it also faces criticism for being unrealistic or placing responsibility on those most at risk. Informed by manuals, training, and feminist scholarship—including Emilia Aaltonen’s critique of ‘feminine vulnerability’ and her conception of self-defence as corporeal resistance—Meg and Gabrielle stage re-enactments to explore how the body might be retrained under threat. Their rehearsals deliberately reject fixed forms, embracing contradiction. The resulting images feel simultaneously empowering, absurd, humorous, and unsettling—mirroring the tensions inherent in self-defence.
By positioning self-defence as both a conceptual framework and a practical method, Tactical Bodies challenges narratives that cast women primarily as victims. It reimagines the constraints placed upon women’s bodies—and the possibility of resisting them through deliberate, physical action.
Catalogue
View full catalogue (PDF)
About the Artists
In 2024, Meg and Gabrielle began a residency at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia, marking the start of their collaborative partnership. Their current research and practice examine how social structures shape women’s experiences, using collaboration and performance to reframe related narratives.
Meg earned First-Class Honours in Photography from the RMIT in 2021. Her ongoing project, The Conversations We Have, won the Ballarat GradFoto 2021 Exhibition and was featured on the cover of Der Greif’s The Collectivity Issue. She also participated in PHOTO 2022’s PHOTO Lab with Magnum Photos. In addition to her photography studies, Meg holds a Diploma of Community Services and a Diploma in Visual Arts, majoring in painting.
Gabrielle Hall-Lomax holds a Master of Arts and Cultural Management from The University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from RMIT. In 2023, she appeared in Der Greif’s 16th issue, Common Love, curated by Shirin Neshat. The following year, Gabrielle was a finalist in the Palm Photo Prize and presented her solo exhibition, Unbodied, at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne.