Artist Profile — Jordy Hewitt
Jordy Hewitt (b. 1985) is an Australian painter whose work navigates contending life and bodily forces, identity, and the subtle intersections of interior and exterior emotional realms. She grew up near the ocean in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia, and now works in Walyalup/Fremantle. Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Art and Design at Curtin University in 2014, Hewitt has exhibited continuously both locally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions and prizes including The Hutchins Art Prize (TAS), Whyalla Art Prize (SA), The Agendo Art Prize (VIC) and The Mandorla Art Award (WA).
Statement:
Moving between varying degrees of abstraction, Hewitt’s paintings are marked by her development of expressive colour fields through blending and layering—manifestations of introspective and often cathartic processes of mixing, adding and scraping away matter. Produced in intensive bursts, her work is intensely personal but intuitively engages with collective experience, often poking holes in the social facades and constructed realities that obscure meaning and betray connection.
She finds solace in the vastness of the Western Australian landscape, and her paintings reflect the nuanced and inextricable relationship between her outside and inside worlds as well as ongoing existential, mythological and astrological inquiry. If Hewitt’s canvases can be read as kinds of landscapes themselves—depictions of emotional, physical and metaphysical terrain—then they are more than mere reflections. They are loaded with an acute disquiet that simmers just below the surface beauty of the environment from which they come. Hewitt is a sceptical optimist, and as an artist she is led to interrogate and rebel against the more problematic perceptions and attitudes beauty can produce. Her paintings attempt to delight but also delve deep into human experience and permit confrontation of its complexity.
