Watery bodies, natures mortes, lost backgrounds and decapitated heads: contemporary painting practice in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This research project uses the concept of the Anthropocene as a catalyst for contemporary painting practice and motors a theoretical enquiry apportioned into written chapters and visual essays. The implication of this approach is that painting practice springboards theoretical research in turn stimulating art practice. Using a practice-based methodology and a semio-materialist perspective, I expand the still life genre and depart from artistic practices that default to landscape, site, environment and place when responding to the concept of the Anthropocene. To sidestep the Anthropocene's scalar vastness, abstraction and representational obstacles, I locate practice within an 'everyday' enquiry, where the objects painted and the artistic artefacts created, are manifestations of the Anthropocene. The research develops what I call the Painting-Anthropocene Nexus, where painting and the Anthropocene intersect. This framework conscripts the themes of agency, materiality, subjects and objects, foregrounds and backgrounds and the representation of nature to identify how early modern European painting has contributed to the concept and condition of the Anthropocene: its anthropocenics. The anthropocenics investigated are the human enticed into narcissism through still and reflective water; subjects and objects severed in visual representations of decapitation; and the backgrounding of nature through linear perspective. In each case my painting practice offers alternatives through a range of media, techniques and motifs.