Darcey Bella Arnold
Order and disorder 2025
wood
$POA
Working with painting, drawing and sculpture, Darcey Bella Arnold’s practice is informed by personal experience and academic enquiry. Using the personal as a departure point, Arnold’s work drifts between intimacy, language, art history and pedagogical theses as it interrogates the fundamental aspects of semiotics and semantics. Her exhibitions are often project-based bodies of research, conceptually centred on themes of chaos and order, structure and exception, energy and entropy. Arnold often manipulates and deconstructs language to become a compositional element in the creation of an image, leaving narrative open for interpretation and meaning uncertain.
Order and disorder 2025 continues Arnold's exploration of themes of chaos and order, and how they play out in various contexts - cosmological, environmental, semantic, artistic, or personal. This installation comprises two piles of refuse plantation timber logs, one stacked in an orderly sequence and the other haphazardly placed. The logs have an 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 endeavour of artists to create form and meaning from chaos.
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).
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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