Learning a Lingo
JOshua De Gruchy
15 February–3 March 2024

This selection of paintings is the result of two years spent living on Wilyakali Country in far west New South Wales. During this time, I have explored station properties surrounding Broken Hill, national parks and found myself returning to Wilcannia and Menindee on the Darling Baaka River.

It is during these trips that I do very little. Time is often filled with looking and listening, making mental notes, cups of tea and the occasional ink drawing or small paint study.

I focus on the colour of the bush, light in the sky and routines of resident fauna, before returning to the studio where I work from memory in order to create the marks and colours that reflect an energy and character of the landscape.

Learning a Lingo is the process of becoming familiar with a localised language or behaviour, and in this sense, I mean it as a way of recognising patterns and activities of a place and identifying what makes it visually recognisable yet imprecise, as it is the challenge of representing a place without defining it, that I work to understand.

Joshua de Gruchy is an artist currently living on Wilyakali Country in far west New South Wales. Having spent time exploring remote areas across Australia, the landscape has become de Gruchy’s primary muse, influencing his palette and lyrical style of mark making through a variety of mediums and raw materials.

Embedded with personal stories and developing concepts, Joshua’s work balances between the abstract and the figurative; experimenting with colour, line and form to understand how a place or memory can be recalled without being defined.

It is during his trips out bush that de Gruchy recognises regenerative cycles and natures continuous effort to maintain stability, leading him to question the behaviours of all living things and the energies between them, and how one who observes these patterns can better understand the ways we as organisms operate on collective and individual levels.