
Anthony Irwin
Artist
Anthony Irwin makes paintings and videos. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools. His recent research centres around a critical investigation of our engagement with digital entities and how this might be reimagined.
CLIMATE
2021
This work engages with Carbon - Borders - Voices via what it presents as the emblematic nature of excessive carbon dioxide emissions of around the last sixty years; the logical consequence, it is suggested, of post-war neoliberal thought. This is thematised in the video, for example, in terms of the release of energy — of a particular kind of subject and industrial process. Drawing upon the recent work of Nancy Fraser (2021), borders and voices in this context are conceived in terms of today’s variously-voiced urgent environmental concerns. It is suggested that there is the potential for these to form an eco-political movement based on a unified critique of the underlying socio-economic structure. The video also offers a critical response to climate change when framed as a problem of individual responsibility, an analogy is made between our relations with digital objects and those with natural world, and via notions of the dematerialised natural asset offers a critique of the natural capital approach to ecology.