Christina Lucia Giuffrida - Diesel and Dust

An ode to pure joy, amidst a world on fire, 'Diesel and Dust' captures a vivid fantasia, weaved together with equal parts nostalgia and dreams of the future. The show’s title is taken from the iconic Australian album ‘Diesel and Dust’ released in 1987 by Midnight Oil. Indeed, this album is the soundtrack to a particular brand of 80s/90s Australiana nostalgia. Yet, rather than dwelling dangerously in yesteryear, these paintings attempt to bring all that makes me tender about the past into a freshly imagined future.

Creating a life outside of the country of your childhood is a particular experience that leaves memories of home vulnerable to romanticism. With this tendency in mind, this body of work was created with total abandon. Each painting gives birth to the next in the studio, assembling like a group of film stills from an epic, never ending narrative. From the desert to the bush, love and adventures play out against the backdrop of the Australian landscape.

In this world, the Australian Larrikin is alive and well in these lavender women. The Larrikin is the scrappy underdog, rebel rouser, the jokester, the “She’ll be right mate” spirit that invites itself into people that spend enough time in the Great Southern Land, no matter your creed, color, gender, sexuality or immigration status. 

A simple enough notion, but one that struck me none the less as an adult gay woman, after a lifetime of conditioning that rendered the term synonymous with men and whiteness. Despite these two gatekeepers, the irreverent nature of this iconic personality always appealed to me as a youngster. I always felt like I was merely a witness to it though never part of it, yet, I was already living it! As these women traverse the dirt roads in their trusty steed, the 1990 GQ Nissan Patrol, this cultural idiom slowly morphs into a more widely encompassing expression of the Larrikin.

The gritty saturate intensity of the gouache paint brings these potent atmospheres to life. Each work is intimate in scale, yet packs a full punch with its highly pigmented details of these cinematic scenes. I work with the gouache intuitively, responding to the sensory process of direct painting. My creative practice started 10 years ago in performance and film making, which I think has allowed me to compose these images for staged dramatic effect. The immediacy of painting with a fast drying medium has allowed animated moments from my imagination to materialise fairly quickly. But it’s finessing the details that let’s me labour over each painting.

The image continues around the edges of the panel giving these works a weighted sense of objecthood and presence on the wall. Historical nods to both European romantic landscape painting of the 19th century, and Mughal Empire miniature paintings collide with the 1990’s animation of my childhood. Namely Disney, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, and Who Framed Rodger Rabbit. This language of cartooning may be seen as a fast grab at being contemporary, but it is a style that makes sense to me in terms of the visual language I’ve grown up on. This is our current state, both physically and psychologically: the oddly close positioning of reality vs. non reality. To create paintings that mimic real life just enough to be recognizable, yet expand it infinitely with the proposition that these people are not real, and this is a suspended reality where suddenly the possibilities are endless.

I want to be the woman driving this 4-wheel drive, because I want to have the adult experience of my childhood dreams. These dreams were not explicitly queer as a child. I don’t think I was relating to the world in those terms. I was just noticing what I found beautiful, what I was fascinated and intrigued by. It has been so revealing to walk back through those ideas and preoccupations as an adult. I really am just a larger, older extension of my child self.

- Christina Lucia Giuffrida