Darcey Bella Arnold’s paintings resemble oversized notebook pages, marked by language experiments and wordplay – repeating prefixes and suffixes, fusing unrelated word fragments and featuring a series of edits, ticks and crosses. Even without insight into the source material of these works, it’s clear that these paintings hold interest in the elasticity of language, treated through a process of experimentation and review.
To create these works, Arnold draws from and recreates pages from notebooks belonging to her mother, Jennifer. Living with an acquired brain-injury, Jennifer has developed significant memory loss that has altered her relationship with language. Her notebooks are densely filled, line upon line, with unconventional, idiosyncratic linguistic dissections that reveal her deeply personal focus on spelling and language structure.
Arnold transforms these pages into large-scale paintings, reproducing her mother’s distinctive handwriting and appropriating her gestural lines, patterns of lettering and word placements. Rather than convey meaning or narrative with words, these paintings embrace a subjective, abstract de-construction of words that echo the sensibility of concrete poetry through their disassembly of language.
The ‘notebook’ series was shown at PICA in the group exhibition, In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy. Arnold’s work uses Jennifer’s meticulous annotations and edits as found material to reflect intimate memories and family relationships. In conversation with Mia Palmer-Verevis, PICA’s Hatched Curatorial Associate (2025-26), Arnold reflected on intergenerational knowledge sharing, the malleability of language and the significance of the written word within her relationship with her mother.
[PICA] Your practice has been informed by your relationship with your mum, Jennifer, who you have been a carer for, alongside other family members, since 2004. How do the paintings in the exhibition In Her Footsteps… speak to your relationship?
[DBA] These works are pretty direct in their appropriation of Jennifer’s language. The process of making them involved looking at her written word and the changes in her linguistics over quite a few years. Jennifer’s language, written and speech, is unconventional because of an acquired brain injury. She’s always had this interest in language and education, previously working as a high school humanities teacher and having four children, and so her playfulness with language comes from a place of education. She would dissect words for us, which she still does now, to help us to learn how to spell and things like that.
Over the years how much she writes is quite dependant on her mood, because when someone’s medicated, motivation can be a complex thing. She has an innate drive to write all this stuff down and so we’ve kept all her notebooks. In deciding to use this as a material in a concrete poetry kind of way, the works are not to be read like a message or a narrative, but like a pattern or device, breaking down language and thinking about language and how it changes. The works that are in In Her Footsteps… come from playing with the writing in these notebooks and often taking direct chunks. A few of them have these lines across them, dividing sections. I really love the way she’ll divide the page with these beautiful curvy lines. They’re so gestural, and so I have gleaned that aspect to include in these works.
As a family we’ve collected a lot of her notes, and she’s a fastidious note taker so there’s a lot of rich material because in her mind her language has changed, but she doesn’t recognise that it hasn’t changed for everyone, so she documents it. These paintings were presented in my first show at ReadingRoom in the city [Naarm/Melbourne], and it was a series of paintings on the wall and plinths on the floor. I wanted you to look over the work as you would look over someone’s writing on a desk.
[PICA] Was there a specific moment when you began to incorporate this into your practice?
[DBA] It didn’t come into my practice for a long time. But being both a carer and an artist weirdly kind of work out because they’re both so unusual in a way – unusual lifestyles where you’re never really able to clock off.
Before working directly with Jennifer’s language, I had to talk to each family member individually and show them what I was making, because it’s a very personal thing to bring into the public realm. I wanted them to approve it and understand why I was doing it. It opened up this space for us to talk about it a little bit, because when you’re in the mix of something it’s hard to sometimes reflect on when it’s still so ongoing, and it’s been over 20 years now. That was a moment for us to kind of pause and talk about it and recognise her changes through the change in language.
The first painting I presented in which appropriated her language was I’ll know my song well before I start singing shown here at PICA and originally made for a show at Sutton Projects in Melbourne 2018. The title comes from a song which Jennifer loves, music and the brain is a fascinating subject, and is written about the Vietnam war which is also of big significance to Jennifer.
[PICA] It sounds like written communication is very important within your relationship with Jennifer
[DBA] Yeah, we rely on the written word a lot, because she believes it. There were different points where she wouldn’t have her memories, so she wouldn’t know where she was. She only got about 30 seconds of memory, so it’s hard to keep notifying her without her getting distressed. A note on the wall became an easy way to communicate, and if someone’s written it down, then she’ll believe it and its accessible for her. The note system became her grounding, as she holds written text in very high regard
[PICA] The series of paintings in this exhibition visualise a deconstruction of language and semiotic structures, which is a strong theme across your work. What do the layers of annotations and edits in these works symbolise?
[DBA] This preoccupation with correcting words and spelling has become a big part of Jennifer’s life. She’ll read The Age and see it all as wrong and then she will want to correct it all. We sort of convinced her to start the notebooks where she could, you know, write down everything that she saw needed fixing. If you look closely, she’s edited one of the paintings in In Her Footsteps…. When I made those works, I was often with her, painting in my studio. I must have gone to the loo or something and when I came back, I was looking at the painting and there was what looked like a little spider on the canvas. She’d gone and corrected the painting with this little cross in ballpoint pen. It’s on the word illuminate, because it contains ‘ill’, that’s just something that she doesn’t like, or she just doesn’t want, so she’ll cross out one of the L’s*. I think it’s pretty bold to go up to a painting like that, show’s her bolshy rebellious sprit. There was one point about 20 years ago where she would correct even the food packaging in the cupboards, she won’t stand for things she sees as wrong. Unsurprising she was a big activist in the 70’s. I wondered what to do with this addition to the painting, because I think the painting must have been almost finished. I decided just to leave it. Ultimately, language changes all the time. There’s no one rule – it’s all made up anyway, it doesn’t have to make sense.
[PICA] Do you view this work as a collaboration with Jennifer?
[DBA] No, I don’t. I thought about this for a long time and have talked about it with colleagues, but it’s because I’m taking something that’s in the world. Yes, it’s something very close to me, but I feel like I’m using it like I do art historical references within my practice, like another material or a pattern. I think it can’t be collaborative because she doesn’t have that memory retention, so I don’t think she could consent to collaboration. I’m sure that would be different for every person with a disability, but that’s what my take on it is.
[PICA] In Her Footsteps… is centred around female lineages and intergenerational knowledge sharing. What types of knowledge have you inherited from the female figures in your life?
[DBA] I’ve taken a lot from what [Jennifer] is doing now, playfulness, like breaking things down and thinking about the etymology of words, the sort of pedagogical nature of it, and the idea that nothing’s fixed.
I think that’s probably the biggest takeaway from her now, as well as when she was, like before, a wonderful mother and teacher. I’ve also taken inspiration from female concrete poets across history. The artist Emily Floyd is a huge influence on me and has kindly offered a lot of advice. Artists and their works which I come back to again and again in the studio are Claire Lambe, Lou Hubbard, Fiona Abicare, Beth Arnold and Vivienne Binns. I recently went on a residency in Ubud Bali and there was another female artist staying in the next villa, Maggie Brink, and I just loved learning and sharing studio techniques with her, studio “show and tells”. We also learnt how to dye and weave together and shared a lot about what it’s like being an artist with a young child.
[PICA] Did your mum encourage your creativity growing up?
[DBA] I’d say so. My Dad teaches in the history and philosophy of science, so they’re quite linked. When I was younger, to try and keep me out of trouble, they made me go to life drawing. I’ve continued on from it with using text and things, but it was like a starting point into everything else. Drawing is kind of the beginning to everything and I am thankful they made me learn so young in a professional setting.
[PICA] How has your relationship to your practice shifted since becoming a mother yourself?
[DBA] I feel like I’ve doubled down on making art, maybe to my own detriment sometimes, because I get really tired! I’ve just become more determined to be an artist, and to be a female artist with a child. It shouldn’t stop your career. I’ve been looking at artists like Camille Henrot. Her work and her writing have been influenced by her experience as a mother. I remember she talked about when she was breastfeeding and she would be doing these watercolours, because it was like everything was liquid, breastmilk, saliva, poo, urine, she constantly had all this liquid around her.
Motherhood and birth have come through a little in my recent work. Like, these new orange works [shown at the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, October 2024], they’re very phallic, referencing the vagina and the phallus and all of that. I am wanting to work within those universal concepts, rather than directly talking about my daughter as a person.
*Darcey Bella Arnold, Ed-it con-tin-u-e, 2019, detail, In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell
Images: Darcey Bella Arnold, In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell
