May Tanya
TCH – Tanya C Hall
As a child playing under trees in the humus scented around them earth, arranging stones, making mud pies under a tap the world is tactile and alive with colour.
Watching, sensing everything around and all with the unquestioning eye of solitude in a place where there is no need for the finding of a voice, or to make a statement, one is simply self absorbed, aware, observing.
Observing people around as well, again unquestioning, absorbing experience and in the centre of this there is play: hands automatically, (or is it instinctively?), busy themselves,drawing in the dust, looking up through the leaves at golden chrysalis-forms, watching ants and seeing what they do when things are placed in front of them; and time, time is slow, non existent even.
The medium is everything, the subject is everything, inspiration is unselfconscious,
subliminal, of the atmosphere.
This is what art is for me, at its centre it is a reconnection with that timeless moment, that instinctive play, those minute distractions.
This is not to say that art is a regression, art now, for me, is the progression of these things and in my practice art moves between observations of natural form to ontology: exploring an
Idealist& sense of the self dream, and abstraction.
Art is the almost immaterial thing that reclaims my being from the status quo, from being just another faceless white woman amongst the masses.
Artist’s Biographical Statement :
Australian Street Performer, Artists’ Model and Artist,Tanya C Hall ( TCH ) , was born in Australian outback city Alice Springs in 1972 and grew up in the deserts and isolation of cattle stations before moving to coastal NSW in the early 1980’s. TCH first began to distinguish herself as having a talent for drawing at age 15 and has pursued a self-taught studio based practice since leaving secondary school in the late 1980’s. She has been a street performer and participated in sundry rural art shows over the last two decades in the Northern Rivers and Mid North Coast – namely the Nimbin School of Arts annual Spring Arts Exhibition; exhibiting and active in the committee of Lismore’s Serpentine Gallery; Elands community’s Talent on the Bulga Art Exhibition in 2008; she curated and exhibited in Elands Community’s Talent of the Bulga Exhibition in 2023. TCH has raised three children and earnt a liberal arts degree BA Honours[Ling. & Eng. Lit.] from UNE [University of New England] in 2018 before embarking upon a BCAR visual arts degree from USQ [University of Queensland] in 2020 which she has graduated from this year.