Darren is most recently the author of Clyma Est Mort (Bloomsbury, 2023) and was with Tami Xiang a co-curator of the 2023 exhibition Beijing Realism that was part of the Perth Festival. With UWA undergraduate students Darren edits the journal Guan Kan: Thinking with Contemporary Chinese Art (https://www.guankanjournal.art/) and contributes to Perth's leading art review, Dispatch Review (dispatchreview.info), as well as to the national publication Artlink. His writing on Australian art has appeared in Art Bulletin, Aboriginal History, History Australia, Third Text and World Art. He is currently running a research project on illustrated literature from remote Aboriginal communities, and is finishing a study of art and literature from sheep and cattle stations in nineteenth and twentieth century Australia.

Darren has previously worked in community radio and social housing. He was course co-ordinator in Internet Studies at Curtin University in 2007 before taking up work at the University of Western Australia.

Darren teaches twentieth century and contemporary art, and supervises postgraduate and honours students in topics ranging from the esoteric art of Aleister Crowley to whale acoustics. 

As a part of his teaching, Darren has taught courses on the relationship of continental philosophy to art and aesthetics, from Kant to Isabelle Stengers. His teaching specialties include the philosophy of surrealism and the impact of poststructuralism on art theory.

Darren has previously published on post-industrial bands Coil and Nurse with Wound, and maintains an interest in pursuing future publications on the industrial and post-industrial music of the 1970s and 1980s.