Written by Gabriela Bartolo
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In reflecting on her origin story, De Gillett Cox has always had a pure artistic spirit which needed to be unleashed. Coming from a diverse creative background, from graphic design to signwriting, it was from a period of illness that she was pushed to break out as an artist. Then, what followed was an enthusiastic exploration of a variety of materials and mediums. De follows her nose and her intuition, both which know no bounds.
Artist: De Gillett Cox
One of De’s fundamental skills and gifts is her honest embracing of the chaos and energy of raw artistic experimentation. However, she has a very solid technical foundation, which acts as a tool kit through which she can express herself authentically. Heading to art school at Griffith University after already having a wealth of creative and life experience, De was absolutely ready to learn and push her skills. She deeply values the role of technical skill, not just concept, and has since been running a local art school with her husband for 13 years. In her personal and teaching practices, she makes the learning, creation, and enjoyment of art accessible to a broad audience.
“I never want my viewers to feel stupid because they don’t understand what I’m trying to talk about. I’m talking about abundance and celebration and gratitude and joy. And those are very easy concepts to understand. Mainly, my work is just to bring joy, just that, that very simple concept.”
Kingfishing | 101 x 76cm, Acrylic on linen
And, in her artistic process, De embodies this joy as an immersive passage. With five or more works on the go at once, all juggled between drying, reviewing, and tweaking, she builds intense depth through her layered approach.
“By the time a painting is finished, there’ll be 15 or 20 layers on there. I’m very interested in the physics of it all. I will set up a slight texture in order to flood that with colour that then responds to all of those brush marks and then build on top of that, maybe with bolder surfaces, I might glaze into that as well.”
Banksia Cascade | 76 x 101cm, Acrylic on linen
In this, she has developed many unique processes, incorporating stencils, negative space, glazes and transparency, textured pastes, and more. She very humbly claims this is due to her being an “impatient sod”, needing to work fast to catch up with her brain, however, it truly demonstrates her dedication to pushing artistic mediums beyond their conventional capacity.
“I think that’s what keeps me so endlessly obsessed with it. I’m one of those poor sods who wakes up in the middle of the night saying ‘I know how I’m going to solve that issue.’”
Paperbark Shadows | 153 x 61cm, Acrylic on linen
With this sense of endless potential, De considers many qualities at once, and this becomes a sort of dance with her medium.
“The hardest, biggest thing I’ve ever done was to learn how to make not one mark too many, because I hold that equally as important, as loving a complicated, very intricate surface. So I want both those things at the same time. I am working in a silent static medium and what my paintings are about is motion and sound.”
Eucalyptus Flame | 30 x 90cm, Acrylic on canvas
This balance between the limits and potentials of her chosen materials demonstrates De’s motivation to transform static mediums into a sensory experience.
“I’m absolutely playing the whole time. But I’m really disciplined with the structure that I need to set up to make it archivally sound. I demand a very high level. But then on top of all that rigour, then I’m just playing and seeing what happens.”
Kangaroo Paw Hinterland | 153 x 61cm, Acrylic on linen
She has the structural foundation which then facilitates true freedom. Part of this foundation is a strong inspirational root in the Futurist movement of the 20th century; their dedication to motion and boundary-pushing is an ethos which De harnesses. However, she is not limited to any one tradition and is presently focusing on exploring her Aboriginal heritage, and has spent time learning from Indigenous artists across the country. This has assisted her in negotiating her position as an artmaker, rather than relying on an individual sense of genius and authorship:
“I am part of this. I am walking around in it and I’m seeing it from many different angles and times at once.”
Treetops Life | 91 x 122cm, Acrylic on canvas
Nevertheless, her personal identity strongly drives her practice. She is unabashedly bold, which she reflects in her tagline, “colours of exuberance.” She adores the process, and is addicted to finding the perfect balances and the satisfying “discords”, which she likens to jazz music. A truly motivating and inspirational practice, which she aims to keep pushing as far as she possibly can.
De Gillett Cox’s work will be featured in two upcoming exhibitions at the Art Lovers Australia Gallery in Melbourne,…
~ Emerging Voices | 22 August-3 October
~ Pulse | 10 October- 21 November.
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