Name

Jo Darvall

Culture

Australian

Gender

Female

Birth date

1966

Birth place

Yarram, Victoria, Australia View on map Close map

Occupations

Printmaker

Summary

Worked: Australia (VIC).

Context

Australia

Biography

Jo Darvall

Originally from Melbourne, Jo Darvall has exhibited for over four decades, presenting twenty solo exhibitions and participating in more than forty-eight group exhibitions across Australia, China, London, Fiji, Italy and Singapore.

She is the recipient of the Australian Council 2025 Print Commission and has undertaken Artist-in-Residence programs with Edith Cowan University and the Parliament of Western Australia (2024). She was awarded the Firestation Print Studio Artist Book Prize (Melbourne) and was the winner of the 2023 Collie Art Prize.

Darvall’s practice centres on an ongoing engagement with landscape and place. Through walking, drawing and attentive observation, she develops a quiet, sensory relationship with the environments she encounters. Informed by landscape poetry, her work uses the landscape as a way of considering broader ideas and experiences, moving between abstraction and figuration to explore atmosphere, memory, texture and rhythm.

She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1990. In the 1990s she co-founded the Artists for Kids Culture Trust, raising over A$1 million for charitable initiatives. Darvall has lectured at Fremantle Arts Centre and the University of Western Australia and is currently a sessional academic at Curtin University. She is also a co-founder of Swan River Print Studio, based at Goolugatup Heathcote.

Her work is held in public and corporate collections including Artbank, Parliament of Western Australia, State Library of Victoria, Museum of Fiji, Geelong Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Royal Children’s Hospital Perth, Crown Towers Perth, Credit Suisse, Janet Holmes à Court Collection and Water Corporation of Western Australia.

Recent publications and media include Art Collector (2025), Artist Profile Issue 70 (2025), IMPRINT Vol. 59 (2024), ABC Radio (2022), and a catalogue essay by Ted Snell (2019). In 2026, her work and the Swan River Print Studio presentation at Sydney Contemporary: Works on Paper were featured in ABC Arts Radio and ABC Arts television, with further coverage in Sasha Grishin’s art criticism and commentary.

Recent presentations include a solo exhibition at Studio Gallery, Yallingup, and exhibitions with Australian Print Council Gallery and Fox Galleries, Melbourne. In 2026, Darvall was a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and exhibited with Swan River Print Studio at Sydney Contemporary: Works on Paper.

Darvall works between Swan River Print Studio at Goolugatup and her painting studio at Artists Foundation in Fremantle. She is represented by Artforum Singapore, Fox Galleries Melbourne, Linton & Kay Galleries Perth, and Studio Gallery Yallingup.

[Jo Darvall, 2026].

Last Updated

15 Oct 2026