Odette England: Dairy Character

Dairy Character is a loose chronicle of Odette England’s experience growing up on a rural dairy farm in southern Australia. Combining recent photographs, family snapshots, archival images, and autobiographical short stories, England examines the male-dominant farming community in which she was raised and the gendered repression that rural females experience. Her images and texts evoke a girl introduced to reproductive labor at an early age. A girl who wanted a pink room. A girl fenced in by interconnecting forms of vulnerability. A girl who had a cow named after her.

Odette England is an artist and writer who uses photography, performance, writing, and the archive to explore themes of autobiography, land, gender, and ritual. She edited the critically-acclaimed book, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph (Schilt 2020). England’s work is held in public collections including the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Texas A&M University, among others. Her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg was published by Radius Books in 2021.