Biography — Driller Jet Armstrong
Driller Jet Armstrong (born in London, UK; lives and works in Australia) is a multidisciplinary artist, DJ, cultural agitator, and the founding force behind Daubism — the radical Australian art movement that began in 1991 with his now-historic intervention Crop Circle on Bannon Landscape. Since that catalytic moment, Armstrong has spent more than three decades reshaping the visual and political conversations surrounding landscape, authorship, and the contested histories embedded in Australian art.
Working primarily with found or second-hand landscape paintings — often sentimental relics of white-settler pastoral nostalgia — Armstrong “daubs” over them with new imagery: First Nations–inspired motifs, rock art silhouettes, Wandjina forms, pop-cultural symbols, and contemporary iconography. Each transformed work becomes a layered cultural palimpsest, exposing the ongoing tension between settler representations of Country and the enduring presence of First Nations peoples whose images and stories were long erased from colonial art.
His ongoing Add-Original series intensifies this critique by directly inserting Indigenous presence into landscapes historically painted to exclude it. Through dots, silhouettes, gel transfers, and re-inscribed iconographies, Armstrong returns the human and the cultural to vistas once sanitised of their rightful custodians.
Across his career, Armstrong has embraced a deliberately provocative and mischievous spirit — one noted early by critic Samela Harris, who called him “the most mischievous artist of our time.” From the early Basquiat Daub (2002) to Ghostscape (2017), Breaker (2015), Calming Force (2013), and the recent Spot Painting series, his works weave together art history, humour, cultural critique and political urgency.
In parallel with his visual practice, Armstrong performs internationally as DJ Driller, drawing a conceptual line between musical sampling and painterly sampling: both acts of appropriation, remix and re-authorship. This cross-disciplinary approach underscores a core Daubist philosophy — that every artwork is part of an ongoing cultural conversation, never a closed or sacred object.
Armstrong is currently represented by Segwood Gallery, Freemasons Lane, Adelaide.
As debates around appropriation, cultural memory, artificial intelligence and artistic ownership intensify, Armstrong’s practice remains fiercely relevant. Through Daubism, he asserts the enduring power of the hand-made mark — the daub — to challenge, reclaim and rewrite the Australian image.