fig 1.  Installation view main gallery



fig 2. Installation view



fig 3. Installation view



fig 4. Installation view



fig 5. Installation view

In the title of The new way to live we find a clue, suggesting that an alteration or schism in the way we approach the world has occurred. The old ways have receded, a fresh way to live is required, but how do we recognise it? How do we grasp its form? In an era of uncertainty – a heating planet, wars, economic displacement, rising global intolerances – in a world we increasingly experience as fleeting and fragmentary, Westwood proposes a survival strategy of radical momentariness, where each fragment, each encounter can be experienced as a totalising instance. Something inexplicable glistens on a flat blue background, two miniature arched rainbows hover in tandem, a nighttime garden has plants with branches and roots that cross over each other with lines sharp as knives, abstract patterns tumble down from ceilings and shapes we feel we should be able to recognise recede into multi-coloured backgrounds.

The new way to live puts forward the idea that to be in the contemporary world is to experience life as an accumulation of fragmentary moments, both ubiquitous and peculiar. Rather than seeking a structure within this tumult we could, Westwood’s painting suggests, accept the chaotic moments as a sequence of equivalences where what matters is not a rationale, but an immersion.