Dirty Work

In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt uses abstract painting to explore emotional and bodily experience through layered, gestural mark-making, treating painting as a physical and “messy” process of labour. The works focus on how feelings and inner states can be built up through material actions like repetition, texture, and paint buildup, with meaning emerging through the act of making rather than depicting anything literal.

Essay by Freya Bennett:

“Dirt is the womb of all becoming. It signifies beginning, fertility, renewal and life. But it also holds us in death, taking what was once ours and returning it to the earth. In Dirty Work, Jordy Hewitt doesn’t shy away from mess and grit. The raw energy of her emotion is alive on the canvas, drawing us into her world, because Dirty Work is a response not just to Hewitt’s world, but to our world at large. Our precious, turbulent world.

Hewitt’s paintings feel cathartic to witness, like a big, yawning, ancestral scream, a release of tension after years of hidden darkness. Dirty Work feels like getting your hands into the soil, feeling tangible life rather than witnessing horror through a screen. Dirty Work is deeply grounding, but also weightless in its release. Dirty Work is about meeting yourself where you are and letting go of where you hoped to be.

In Hewitt’s brushstrokes, I see a mother holding a child, a precious gem mid-formation, a bird nestled in the clouds, observing with the warmth of a beloved. I see an acceptance of life’s difficult parts—more than acceptance, a celebration of them—for it is through pressure that we emerge luminous.

The word “dirt” is often used to describe something shameful, something ugly to be brushed away or scrubbed out. But there is nothing shameful about ugliness. Life is a delicate balance of the ugly and the beautiful, and as we grow, as we age, the things we once deemed ugly often reveal themselves as beautiful, as our vision becomes more sophisticated. Life comes from mess, life comes from pain and difficulty; life has no interest in our crude ideas of perfection.

To witness Hewitt’s Dirty Work collection is to feel held within the unknown, and to allow the weight of things to become part of our story, without taking away the divinity that is a soft breeze, a cocoon opening, an eyelash falling, or a sapling emerging.”

To register your interest, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au