Odette is an Australian artist working in America
Episode 252: Odette England is an Australian artist living and working in America. This is our second episode together.
In this second episode, we speak about Odette’s new book Dairy Character and how it came together. We discuss themes behind the work which include family, growing up on a remote farm in Australia, and how roles, both labor and culture are gendered in such environments. We discuss this through the sublimely paralyzing work of Dairy Character published by Saint Lucy Books.
In the conversation, Odette and I spoke about a number of key transitions in the work from photographs that she has made and the use of vernacular archival material from family archives that engage the viewer with the work alongside her written text. This text enables the images as much as the images begin to feel suggested something documented, narrated, but without ever getting too literal or biographical.
We discuss how an animal husbandry manual formed the nucleus of thinking about the work and her life growing up on the farm, but how that, in turn, informed larger cultural notions. We discuss the role of her family in making the work and we discuss some cultural references such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and the idea of the Outback Gothic. We reference quite a bit in the episode. Please tune in. It was an absolute pleasure to speak with Odette again.
