A town where everything is footy: How a star player is merging sport and art

At the Runner Up rooftop venue in Collingwood Yards, Darcy Vescio is preparing a very different type of clubroom. Carlton’s star player in the women’s league, leading goalkicker and sometime vice captain, is also a practicing artist.

On May 24, as part of Melbourne Design Week, Runner Up is hosting Re-Imagining the Clubhouse, a one-day exhibition in which 10 artists explore team sports from new angles. Vescio’s work subverts the focus on victory, with pink tufted pennant flags commemorating missed goals and lost glories. “Devastated,” reads one. “Next year,” reads another.

Darcy Vescio with some of the works being exhibited this weekend as part of Melbourne Design Week.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“These spaces are always about the club’s triumphs and celebrated moments,” Vescio says. “I wanted to explore the failures and moments of sorrow. They’re what makes the triumphant moments special.”

Footy and art are atypical dual careers. For many, there’s a distinct divide between the two. Vescio doesn’t see it that way.

“I think I’ve always liked doing stuff with my hands,” Vescio says. “Sport and art allow me to be expressive in different ways. When I was a kid, I was either outside playing with a ball or inside with all my art stuff sprawled out on the lounge room floor, scrap booking, making rings, papercraft, anything.”

Darcy Vescio puts a new spin on the Brownlow Medal.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Some of Vescio’s earlier works are in the show too, including a large, fluffy rethink of the Brownlow Medal as the “You Go Alright Trophy”, and a colourful painting entitled Markwood, depicting a Sim City-like town where everything is footy, from the oval “draft pool” to the grinning Luna Park face wearing a mouthguard. It’s playful, detailed, and deeply personal.

It’s also a far cry from the real Markwood, where Vescio grew up. Population 230, 20km outside Wangaratta, it’s “mostly paddocks,” they tell me. Vescio has been kicking a footy since they were five years old. Any paddock was an oval, and any two objects were a goal. To the local community, Vescio was “the girl who played footy”.

“It spurred me on to be good at it, so I could be part of the team and blend in,” they say. As an AusKick kid, half-time at a men’s senior game was their Grand Final. Off the field, they played with their brothers off the main road. “If I heard a car coming, I’d wait and try to time it so I’d be diving for a mark or doing something spectacular on the off-chance the driver would swivel their head and see. I needed to show people.”

But the real badge of honour was not being identified as a girl at all, but as just another player. They’ve thought about this aim a lot since coming out as non-binary in 2021, adopting they/them pronouns and rethinking their whole approach to gender.

Darcy Vescio during a training session in 2022. Credit: Kelly Defina/Getty Images

The other love of Vescio’s life is art. At the tiny Markwood Primary School, a regular visit from the “art van” brought craft supplies and excitement. “The school was so small that everyone dove into everything,” says Vescio. “You couldn’t be cliquey. You’d have no one to play with.”

By 14, it was no longer deemed appropriate for a girl to play footy with the boys. Vescio thought they’d never play again and focused on art and design. For the next few years, footy was reduced to watching the boys play and Nine’s predominantly male The Footy Show, which offered young Vescio their one-and-only exposure to women’s football: a clip of a woman being swung by her plaited hair. “In my head it’s become like Miss Trunchbull swinging the girl around in Matilda,” says Vescio. “It’s seared into my memory. Like, that’s just what happens in women’s footy.”

At 18, a move to Melbourne changed everything. Vescio came to study graphic design at RMIT, but someone had heard there were women’s football teams there. They joined the Darebin Falcons, and soon got a job as a graphic designer for the Carlton Football Club. When the AFLW kicked off in 2017, Carlton drafted them. The path from team graphic designer to vice-captain and leading goalkicker was unusual in professional sport, but AFLW was new, and the opportunities were many.

For this show, Vescio is keen to express the clubroom as a place of community and gathering, and introduce some vulnerability to the space. The tufted flags are pink, a typically “feminine” colour shunned by sporting clubs. For Vescio, it ties into being in touch with loss and being open to expressing that.

“Art is for everyone and sport is for everyone too,” they say. “The way those things are governed, it can feel like you don’t belong in either space. Sport can be seen as competitive and toxic, but it’s also about play and community.”

Vescio tries to encourage creativity in their teammates. They run a Monday night craft club, where their colleagues join in painting, drawing, quilling, anything.

“They come in saying they’re just there to hang out, but then they love it.”

Re-Imagining the Clubhouse is at Runner Up on Saturday May 24 as part of Melbourne Design Week.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.