Rox de Luca & Jo Darbyshire
Australia's social history is a medley of cultures: sub-cultures shaped by time, location, isolation, language, and custom. In many cases migrant peoples have retained a sense of cultural tradition which has been long lost in their native lands. This is partly an attempt to retain a sense of identity in foreign and initially alienating lands.
50 Reasons, a collaborative exhibition by Rox De Luca and Jo Darbyshire was the sequel to their 25 Reasons, exhibited at aGOG, Canberra, in 1997. It is a further chapter in the artists' ongoing enquiry into identity through the revisitation of memory and personal history.
The works present narratives which are developed through the individual diaristic approach of these artists who live on opposite coasts of Australia, are from contrasting cultural backgrounds and who have similarities and differences which shaped the various periods of their lives. Rox De Luca, based in Sydney, was born in Australia to Italian parents who migrated from Calabria to Melbourne in the late 1950s. De Luca uses symbols drawn from her 'reality', real or perceived - a coffee percolator, crisp white underpants, doilies and tablecloths, food and family photographs. Jo Darbyshire lives in Perth. Her anglo-Australian heritage is explored through her surroundings and nature. Flowers, plants and fruits become still-lifes referencing the singularity of the Western Australian environment and her childhood and adolescence in a vast, distant, yet perhaps more informal and unconfined land.
Working with paint on aluminium, De Luca's images are formal, urban and, at times, static. The surfaces are sometimes scratched, thinly painted, and the metal panels are embossed. Many images have a delicate yet industrial quality. In contrast, Darbyshire's paintings on canvas depict the natural environment