Hayley Megan French was the inaugural visiting artist with The Border Line in October 2019.
Over the past year Hayley has been documenting and interpreting her experience of living in Guildford, a Western Sydney suburb, the unceded home of the Bidjigal Clan of the Darug Nation. Beginning by taking polaroids of her neighbourhood, Hayley has been painting over these photographs, to spend time with them, to develop an intentionalised understanding of the place in which she lives.
Here at The Border Line, Hayley has carried her artistic process and engagement with suburbia to Kununurra. This subverts and deftly engages with the notion of the ‘outback’ that so commonly shapes popular perceptions of this place. Instead we see Kununurra as suburb—a suburb island of settler-colonialism perched on Miriwoong country amidst the east Kimberley savannah. In some ways The Border Line exists in this suburban space, being on both sides, and on the threshold, of suburbia and ‘the outback’, Miriwoong and settler colonial cultures; past, present and future as a continuum that we are all implicit in.
During her time with The Border Line, Hayley connected with Perth-based poet and suburbanism theorist Robert Wood, which has allowed for a deeper engagement with the ideas driving her practice, and her understanding of suburban spaces. Robert and Hayley’s correspondence has been published on Semaphore.
