Having spent over a decade experimenting with applications like jewellery and textile design, it was a natural progression for me to start painting.
My background in costume for film and television and a passion for textiles - primarily tribal and ethnic designs – has influenced my painting style.
I’m self taught, and it has only been through practice and time that I have nurtured my style. I grew up in the Barossa Valley surrounded by vineyards and wide open spaces, and in so doing, developed a deep concern with natural forms connected to life – plants, bones, feathers, hills, trees, stones, and water. More and more I realise that my paintings are a path of self discovery and an expression of life’s experiences. As an artist, I understand that nature and life have a lot to offer
These works reflect a kind of juxtaposition of the landscape around me. Cutting, chopping, and reassembling pieces together again from a scrapbook of memories and imagination. Small dots and markings represent natures gifts from the elements.
The final piece is a mosaic of my own landscape, threading nature and life together.
With Santucci … there is a pleasure principle at work. The viewer is invited to explore the carpet-like designs as if gazing down at landscapes composed of vineyards, paddocks, roads, creeks and trees.
Santucci enjoys building the image by first creating rich exchanges of colours, textures and patterns then seductively masking and isolating areas using white pigment. Santucci’s exploitation of translucency, particularly in the final overlays … give her images allusive, poetic qualities. Her references also to the specifics of everyday things such as buds, branches, a trowel, trees, roads, the moon and stars introduce a clue-search dynamic to the viewing. There are contexts for this work, more European than Australian. I’m thinking of obvious similarities with Paul Klee’s worlds of invention but more of the painterly values and semi-abstract style associated with post-WW2 artists working out of St Ives in Cornwall, William Scott and Peter Lanyon in particular.
John Neylon, The Adelaide Review, August 2007
2015 Double show, Gallery One Gold Coast
2015 Art Images, Adelaide
2014 Double show, Gallery One Gold Coast
2013 Double show, Gallery One Gold Coast
2012 Solo show, Soho Gallery Sydney
2011 Group show Art Images Gallery Adelaide
2010 Double show Soho Gallery Sydney
2010 Solo show Green-wood Gallery Melbourne
2008 Solo show Green-wood Gallery Melbourne
2008 Art Brisbane 08, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2008 Art Melbourne 08, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2007 Art Sydney 07, Green-Wood Gallery, New Generation Art, NSW
2007 Solo show, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2007 SALA Festival, Barossa Valley, SA
2007 Art Melbourne 07, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2007 Solo show, Jackman Gallery, VIC
2006 Group show, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2005 Solo show, Jackman Gallery, VIC
2004 Double show, Green-Wood Gallery, VIC
2004 Group show, ‘Works on Paper’, Jackman Gallery, VIC
2004 Solo show, Jackman Gallery, VIC
2003 Group show, ‘The Blue Show’ Jackman Gallery, VIC
2003 Group show, ‘Urban Life’, Jackman Gallery, VIC
1999 Group show, ‘Souls in Control’, Fitzroy Gallery, VIC
Runner-up, People’s Choice Award, Art Sydney 08
The Age, Herald-Sun, The Adelaide Review, House & Garden, Vogue, Home Beautiful, Real Living
Victrack, Foxtel film sets, private collections in Australia and USA