Painting the Anthropocene’s agitated physicality

In 2000, atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and freshwater ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer wrote that our current negative human impact on the Earth System has moved the planet into a new and more extreme geological age. They named it the Anthropocene, the “age of humans”. I approach the Anthropocene as an abstract painter. This practice-based research project creatively responds to the wide-reaching environmental and ecological destruction the Anthropocene threatens, and the readily observable 2017-2020 Eastern Australia drought and bush fires that overshadowed the early stages of this PhD project. From the outset, I understand that there is a tension in trying to represent the Anthropocene and its global scale, complexities, and catastrophic outlook, using the anachronistic and yet loaded materiality of paint. How can an abstract painting practice articulate, represent and discuss the extremes of the Anthropocene? And what are the key material and historical qualities/conventions, central to the medium of painting, that can be used to investigate, imagine and reflect upon the Anthropocene? I explore these tensions through extensive studio experimentation and an approach to painting as a dense cultural object embedded with complex relationships between picture, materials, history and words. Experimentations to scale-up and exaggerate brush marks are central to the creation of my paintings. My amplified mark-making, along with discordant colours, read as substances and forms that are subject to intense forces or have undergone extreme change and read as “hyper-substances”. Through synthesising traditions of extreme and sublime landscapes, from Romantic 19th century landscapes to superhero comic book fantasy imagery, I form the metaphor/narrative/representations of a “super-landscape”. Complexity, tension, humour and drama is further developed through each painting’s title. My poetic imaging of the Anthropocene, through a critical and reflexive painting practice, is my contribution to a broader humanities engagement with the Anthropocene.