Darcey Bella Arnold
Order and disorder 2025
plantation waste timber
Order and disorder examines the interplay between chaos and order, observing how these universal themes manifest across diverse contexts—cosmological, environmental, semantic, artistic, or personal. This installation comprises two piles of refuse timber logs, one stacked in an orderly sequence and the other haphazardly placed. The logs have a pointed octagonal form resembling a pencil, the common tool of choice for both written and visual communication. In the context of Lorne Biennale, the installation Order and disorder relates both to the local logging history and the inevitable environmental entropic march of time.
Darcey Bella Arnold works between painting, sculpture and drawing in a research-based practice that anatomises language to annotate its necessity and fallibility. Arnold deploys strategies of metaphor, recollection, double entendre, repetition and humour to examine familiar histories, obfuscate conventional symbolism and re-examine cultural touchstones. Her inventive pictorial world is constructed through liberal samplings from art history, contemporary politics, personal archives and popular culture. Individual works often correspond both spatially and conceptually, drawing viewers into installation driven environments.
Darcey Bella Arnold lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, completing a Bachelor of Fine Art, Drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts (2007), and a Bachelor of Fine Art, Honours at Monash University (2009). Selected solo exhibitions include: A Measure of Disorder, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne (2022); and me say edit be, ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2020); My Mother's Labour, Sutton Gallery Project Space, Melbourne (2018); and Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, Testing Grounds, Melbourne Arts Precinct (2017). Select group exhibitions include Maternal Inheritances, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Victoria (2023); The Churchie Award, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022); and Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, Victoria (2022); If Not At Arm's Length, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2022); and Sikås Biennale, Sikås Art Centre, Jämtland, Sweden (2020).
This project was generously supported by patrons Philip and Elizabeth Williams, and assistance from Emil Toonen.
Images: Order and disorder, log edition 2024, installation view, ReadingRoom. Photo Simon Lawrie (top); Darcey Bella Arnold (bottom). Courtesy the artist.
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