Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2024 - Student interview - 01. Darcy Gralton

DARCY GRALTON: I'm Darcy Gralton, and I studied visual arts at Presbyterian Ladies' College in Sydney.

My body of work 'Breathing Room' aims to tackle the Sydney housing crisis and how many individuals have been confined to smaller, compact spaces.

There are many artist inspirations for me. Rachel Milne, who's a-- specifically her interiors. She's an oil artist who paints on board, and I was really interested in how she painted interiors and how she captured the light within the expression of the space.

And also Lilli Stromland, who's an oil artist who works with still life. She really helped me capture some of the light and painting light as kind of an aura. Like it doesn't reflect on anything, but it's just light in the air, which was really hard, but she helped me a lot.

The work begun with my interest in interiors. I had no idea where I was going to go with claustrophobia or anything. I just knew that I wanted to paint interiors. And so the first work I painted was the one with the man on top of the ladder. After I'd finished that work, I got really interested in adding more clutter to the surfaces in the work and expanding on this kind of fisheye lens that was in that work and kind of propelling the audience to experience that themselves.

So that's when I kind of moved to places around Sydney, and I captured photos of various housing areas, interiors and exteriors, to try and capture the feeling of claustrophobia. So yeah, it kind of moved from a focus from interiors to a focus on the subjective feeling evoked by a claustrophobic interior.

Yeah, I found I'd get frustrated with one painting, so I'd start another one, and then I'd start another one, and then I'd go back to the first one. So yeah, I had multiple paintings going on at once, but I think I was at distinctly different levels of completion for each one. And a lot of them I didn't finish until they'd all been painted, if that makes sense. I added final details, some larger details, after I had selected them all.

It was a lot about finding what kind of style I wanted to paint the works in, whether I wanted more painterly. Wendy Sharpe was one of my influences, and she has a very distinct style, but I tried to kind of work with that at the really beginning, like my VAPD, and it just wasn't very successful. So rather from influence, I took her yellows and her greens.

So yeah, I had a very detailed kind of precise style that I ended up echoing across all of my work. Some areas are more painterly than others. But as you kind of zoom in, a lot of it's very specific and intricate.

So the distorted perspectives begun with my first artwork, which was the ladder, the man one. And immediately-- my dad's an architect, and he was being so-- like, that's not right and everything because it was fisheye. So it was really difficult to kind of capture that.

But then I felt like I wanted to echo that in other paintings as well because I feel like it created a very intimate relationship with the subject. You were kind of forced into this area that you had no real choice being in. It was uncomfortable and claustrophobic, exactly. So yeah, by distorting the kind of lens, not only can it make things feel unsettled and uncomfortable but it also forces you to reflect on them and see them as they are in a different lens, kind of.

My advice for future art students would be go in with an open mind. Have no idea where your destination is. I think if I had had kind of a specific end point, it would have been so much more difficult, and I would have had so much higher expectations. I think if you go in not knowing where you're going to go next, the artwork kind of leads itself, and you can end at a point that you're happy with but also make sense as a harmonious body of work.

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