Million Tear Chandelier
Jo Darbyshire
2006 | oil on canvas| accession number 717
purchased by the Art Board 2006 - Murdoch University Art Collection

Jo DARBYSHIRE

born 1961, Perth, Western Australian
lives and works, Perth, Western Australia

Million Tear Chandelier is a further development of the artist’s series of paintings titled Ghost River Paintings which were created in 2005. This body of work was developed with the assistance of research grants awarded to the artist from the Western Australian Ministry for Culture and the Arts and the Australia Council to develop a series of paintings informed by the Swan River at night.

These paintings explore the mystery of an underwater world experienced at night. The viewer is reminded of the experience of trailing figures through phosphorescence in water, of being submerged with schools of fish or microscopic organisms and the duality of beautiful and terrifying sensations of seeing dark shapes while submerged underwater. This liminal place also includes floating memories of personal and public history. These paintings have been described as being “landscapes without boundaries” in which the viewer’s sense of field and orientation is blurred; are you looking down through the water from above, or submerged and looking up, surrounded by it?

Darbyshire adds that the Chandelier paintings series are about “loss and death, light and beauty. They exist in an underwater world of memory and history. Above all they are about paint; layers of transparent colour and the illusion of depth.

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