Sutton Projects is pleased to present My Mother’s Labour, a solo exhibition by Darcey Bella Arnold.

Arnold’s works explore labour, particularly the parallel between artistic production and the creation and upkeep of the home. Employing both utilitarian and decorative materials such as house paint and upholstery fabric, Arnold paints the textured facades of the familiar brick veneer home, a staple of Australian residential architecture.

These flat, hard-edge paintings are layered with references to interior domestic settings and playful, scaled-up depictions of hand-written notes, alluding to household social dynamics. By fusing the internal with the external, the public with the private, Arnold points to narratives that are at once personal and political. Alongside these paintings sit figurative works of women making art, sketched by Arnold’s mother and then reinterpreted by the artist. In doing so, the physical and emotional labour of both mother and daughter is used to position the house as a vessel for speaking about art making, feminism and storytelling.