Warwick Heywood: Painting the Anthropocene’s Agitated Physicality
Warwick Heywood
This PhD research project responds to the severe 2017-2020 Eastern Australia drought and bush fires and the idea of the Anthropocene — a theory that our human impact on the Earth System is devastatingly immense and enduring. Reflecting on the extremes of these climatic events Heywood begun a larger speculative investigation and imagination of the Anthropocene’s “agitated physicality”.
This project self-consciously represents the Anthropocene through painting’s materials, processes and visual traditions, including painterly abstraction. The formalist, deconstructionist, spiritual and sublime projects of High Modernism and postmodernism, become a potent language through which to detect and explore the present. Heywood sets out to create a conceptual, cognitive space to pose questions, form comparisons, and create rich metaphors and analogies through paint. The key representation that emerges through his work is an Anthropocene as a bizarre overactive and out of control experiment, where our physical world, at macro and micro scale, is being pushed to greater and more dynamic extremes.
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