Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s latest exhibition is certainly of and about our times. It’s a kaleidoscope of colour and imagery drawing together three series of works on paper, embracing a fragile medium to express a conflagration of fact, biography and imagination.

It finds a form, as Samuel Beckett suggested, “to accommodate the mess”.

The exhibition, at QUT Art Museum, is thus entitled This Mess We’re In: Pat Hoffie.

Hoffie has worn many hats. For decades she was an educator at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and was by all accounts an inspired teacher. Her intellect is engaged and active and, alongside spending decades as a full time academic, she has always made and exhibited her art.

Now that she has “quit work” she seems to be more productive than ever creating, curating, writing fiction, poetry and essays. In all these endeavours you inevitably find empathy for the dispossessed and marginalized and a love of telling stories.

This major survey of works on paper demonstrates that she’s always looking, thinking and responding to the world’s unfolding realities. Her observations trace human behaviour through monumental explorations of the quirks and contradictions of this moment in the 21st century.

There are three series, all watercolour on paper, which speak to Hoffie’s interests in subverting a media also relegated to the fringes. This is, traditionally, a minor genre, despite its untidily expressive possibilities demonstrated so powerfully here. Yet in terms of subject matter and influences, Hoffie declares …“I wanted to go back to the heritage of people like (Flemish Renaissance painter) Breugel or, say, a muralist like Diego Rivera. I thought I might use material that was much more fragile than the walls often traditionally used to depict epics, with those subjects painted onto buildings.”

The first room features watercolours on coloured paper from 2003 called ready to assemble and, despite their genesis twenty years ago, with subjects including IKEA flat packs, joined with people and drones, industrial sized wheels, satellites, patterns, whales and gesture, the tone, tension and disassociation in each image feels prescient. As Hoffie writes in the accompanying book – “Even then, it was looking like the world was going to need fixing”.

clusterfkk, produced between 2018-2020, is a series of much larger works that extend right to their edges, a kaleidoscope of imagery captured similar to the way that we tend to experience disasters and world events crowding our screens. In bright, jewel-like colours, violence and mayhem accelerate past people in the same landscape. Many of these individuals seem oblivious to their environment, absorbed in an alternate reality on their phones. These images come together as a multiverse, drawing experiences from Hoffie’s life spliced with world wars, atrocities, and explosions.

I Am Scared/I Stand Up, 2018, quotes New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. Around these words, people and troops mass, explosions blow shrapnel into a yellow sky, and the threat is palpable, yet people with phones are soporific, or taking selfies. Technology is an antidote (and contributor) to the brutal realities.

Amidst these crowds Hoffie and daughter Visaya appear as a repeated motif. Although Hoffie avoids talking about deeply personal concerns in these works, she uses McCahon’s words to address the power of simply making the decision to stand up in the face of adversity.

The final room is smoke and mirrors, 2016, with imagery of ships under looming clouds of dementor-like darkness on white paper, or alone, dwarfed amongst huge seas. These works are a tour de force, a challenge to the triumphant rhetoric around turn backs of boats of asylum seekers in that period, portrayed not with polemics but with heart.

In the making of these gouache and charcoal works, Hoffie does not pre-draw or plan but simply starts and continues. The results see the gesture emerge with directness and lightness of touch. And where previous iterations are overpainted and changed, the messy nature of the process is embraced.

“I wanted to emphasize the fragility of the image, alongside our hopes and dreams that are there too, underneath all the surface electricity and cataclysm,” Hoffie says. In the limited edition book she’s produced for the exhibition she writes about standing up to make art “in response to our times” by quoting Samuel Beckett, whose 1961 challenge was to “find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist right now.”

In this series her lyricism is palpable, concern and observations powerfully expressed, indeed a Force Majeure as the title of one work suggests.

Accompanying book: This Mess We’re In: Pat Hoffie, contributors Pat Hoffie, Carol Schwarzman, Vanesssa Van Ooyen, published by QUT Galleries & Museums, Brisbane, 2023. 

This Mess We’re In : Pat Hoffie, QUT Art Museum, QUT Gardens Point Campus, 2 George Street, Brisbane, until March 10 2024. 

artmuseum.qut.edu.au

 

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