A YEAR OF LIVING

‘Eroticism is the approval of life unto death’ - Georges Bataille.

In her series ‘A Year of Living,’ Halsall explores nostalgia and fantasy as a complex coping mechanism for grief and invites her viewers to reflect on the transient beauty of interdependence in intimate relationships.

‘A year of living’  began when Halsall’s father was first re-diagnosed with throat cancer after thirty years in remission. Her creative process became a conduit to explore her relationship with her father more deeply as well as a distraction from the shock of this news and the onslaught of the following few years.

Halsall spent month’s photographically capturing transitional moments in scenes from art house films from all over the world, amassing a folder of hundreds of potential compositions and narrowing the collection down to seventy four, through an intuitive selection process. She began to see that some compositions would ‘bite’ her subconscious more than others, triggering a familiar or comforting response evoking poignant memories of her own experiences, that in retrospect are stained with the feeling of that moment in time, and imbued with the grieving process Halsall and her family experienced.

The images that evolved as a result began to evoke nostalgic childhood memories and idealised moments from adolescence as well as instances of adult adventures, hopes and flights of fantasy where parallel lives can be entertained.

‘Washer woman’ represents Halsall’s childhood back garden where eventful and fantastical feral games took place. In ‘Home phone, phone home,’ the large yellow dial phone is a visual metaphor for the post-nineties home phone era, and its relative simplicity and freedom. ‘Lisbon’ represents obsessive dreams of living an alternative lifestyle and ‘Ariege’ is a meditation on a desolate winter holiday spent in a village in the South of France.

These glorified moments of memory and fantasy create a warm body of work that justifies the need for nostalgia and romanticism as a means of creating joy as an antidote for suffering and grief.