Tajette O’Halloran — The Quarry
1 August 2025 — 31 August 2025
Over the past four years, Tajette O’Halloran has undertaken a sustained engagement with an abandoned brickworks quarry in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Located within a flood-prone landscape marked by cycles of disruption and recovery, the quarry operates as both a geographic site and a social register—reflecting broader tensions between environmental instability and the search for continuity and connection.
At the centre of this work is the experience of adolescence in regional and rural contexts. O’Halloran foregrounds young people as active agents negotiating identity, autonomy, and belonging within landscapes shaped by climate crisis and structural precarity. The quarry becomes an informal social space—unregulated, mutable, and symbolically charged—where adolescents gather, perform, and form provisional communities outside institutional oversight.
O’Halloran’s images reflect how youth culture is shaped by the material and social conditions of place. Focusing on everyday gestures—gathering, withdrawal, quiet resistance—the work reveals how personal and environmental states intersect within a landscape marked by both beauty and breakdown. The Quarry offers a regional perspective where climate disruption, limited infrastructure, and social isolation converge with the complexities of adolescence, contributing to broader conversations around youth, place, and visibility in contemporary Australia.
Install
Tajette O’Halloran is an Australian photographic artist whose practice investigates the social and emotional terrain of adolescence, identity, and belonging within the context of regional and rural Australia. Drawing on both documentary traditions and constructed narrative techniques, her work navigates the complex interplay between memory, place, and interpersonal relationships.
Operating at the intersection of personal history and broader cultural narratives, O’Halloran’s images often reconstruct lived experiences, revealing the psychological dimensions of growing up in peripheral communities. Through a considered use of light, gesture, and environment, she captures moments that are at once intimate and universally resonant—framing the everyday as a site of vulnerability, transformation, and quiet resistance.
Her methodology is rooted in long-term engagement with place and community, often working collaboratively with her subjects to co-create images that blur the line between observation and orchestration. This sustained, immersive approach allows for a nuanced exploration of identity, social structures, and the shifting dynamics of youth within the Australian landscape.
O’Halloran’s work has been widely exhibited and recognised in both national and international contexts. She is currently undertaking a 12-month commission with the Powerhouse Museum to document nightlife in the Northern Rivers region, and her debut solo exhibition will open in August at Hillvale Gallery in Melbourne. Her practice has been acknowledged through numerous awards and accolades, and her work continues to feature in prominent arts and cultural publications.
A member of the Oculi Collective, O’Halloran brings a distinctly personal and critical lens to contemporary Australian photography—one that foregrounds emotional resonance, personal and collective memory, and the layered complexity of life in regional communities.
Exhibition Opening
Friday 1 August
6pm-8pm
[link to Event page COMING SOON]