Pat Hoffie is standing in front of a work from her Clusterfkk series (2018-20), her hand running across the surface as she points out various details and textures. We’re at QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, where her solo exhibition this mess we’re in has recently opened. A survey, it concentrates on three bodies of work spanning 20 years, all linked by their shared themes of chaos and calamity. Hoffie is explaining the context of each of the series and reflecting on her artistic decisions.

“The primary driver is always the medium; it changes the language of each painting. I like the mistakes and the lacunae, and the time spent making worlds helps make sense of what’s in my head.”

Clusterfkk was created after Hoffie quit teaching and returned to her studio full time, which she describes as a period of “ramping up” rather than winding down. The series features expansive watercolour and gouache paintings made across multiple panels of translucent architectural paper, the support’s fragility offering a perverse attraction for Hoffie given the likelihood the substrate will break down over time. Recalling the debauched, epic fantasies of artists such as Hiëronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69), Clusterfkk is dense with literary and historical references, wry comments on popular culture, and symbols lifted from social movements. Adding to the maelstrom is a cast of unnerving child figures in the style of Henry Darger (1982-1973), impervious, or in some cases contributing, to the pandemonium. The intensity is further enhanced by Clusterfkk’s installation, which takes full advantage of QUT’s vault-like gallery space. Float-mounted from the walls to allow light to filter in from behind, they recall ancient papyrus paintings when glimpsed between the gallery’s internal columns.

There’s a sense Hoffie has poured everything into these works – they offer glimpses of her career, her private life and years travelling the world, as well as addressing the oppressive madness that continues to engulf the planet. The paper ripples from overwork, rubbing back and reapplying paint. There are areas full of intense and pointed detail – oblivious humans staring at their phones while the world explodes around them, students engulfed in bubbles floating above a sea of flailing academics. Other sections are less precise, capturing the frenetic energy of the scene.

“I used to tell students, ‘Read as much as you can about history, but also be fully aware of contemporary culture. Where those two things intersect, that’s the point from which you speak.” She stops and considers what she’s saying. “I think a lot of art right now is so disengaged. People are so worried about being cancelled. Maybe I’m too old to care about that; old enough to tell myself, ‘Just shut the fuck up and let it happen, rather than thinking you have to prove yourself.”

It’s the sort of direct assessment you expect from Hoffie. Now in her fifth decade of practice, she’s something of a guru in Queensland, where she has mentored generations of artists. Her contribution to the creative arts has earned her both the title of Professor Emeritus and an Order of Australia medal. She remains acutely engaged in Australia’s art scene and the state of visual arts education in this country. Hers is a respected voice, regularly writing on visual arts and socio-political issues – often using her critiques as rallying cries for people to take action. At openings, she can generally be found talking quietly to an artist, a gallery director, or a politician about whatever has awakened her curiosity. “Hey, tell me something” she’ll say, before leaning in to hear what shakes out.

But to place Hoffie atop a pedestal is to miss the aspect of her that still craves learning and listening, and that constantly questions her own position on things. “I hope that none of them are taking a moral or ethical stance,” she says while gazing at one of Clusterfkk’s darker, less intensely filledworks, Purgatory (The Cave) (2018) that features depictions of her daughter looking through a kaleidoscope. “Maybe they’re more enquiries into my own dark and withered soul.” She gives me a wry smile. “It’s funny, looking back.”

Hoffie leads me to the earliest series in the show, Ready to Assemble (2003); 22 discrete works created in a subdued palette of chocolate, taupe, grey and duck egg blue, and exhibited together here for the first time. Gouache spills across the pages in blobby freeform, over which line drawings of IKEA DIY furniture jostle with obsolete technologies, and humans and animals go about their daily lives. A tank rolls across one work, heading towards a menacing wolf. Two humpback whales drift languidly in another, their form and movement replicated by a Zeppelin hovering above. Some feature a grid pattern, the eternal symbol of perfection, but here it’s a bleeding, broken down tribute to failed inventions and manmade disasters, and the once firmly held belief that industrialisation moves the world forward. They’re oddly affecting, somehow managing to harness my nostalgia for relics of the past (if not my distain for putting together an IKEA flatpack!). Such disparate elements shouldn’t come together comfortably, but they do. As we make our way along, Hoffie points out two scientists operating on a small animal, a woman caring for an old lady in slippers, an astronaut floating weightlessly above the moon. “I’ve noticed there’s a kind of tenderness in these I hadn’t seen before.” I ask her if she remembers the context in which the series was made. “I was probably responding to the paint more than anything. I don’t really start with a theme. I think art works best when the inspiration is elusive and stays elusive. If I had it all worked out on a screen before I started, I wouldn’t go ahead with it. What would be the point?”

We wander back through Clusterfkk to Smoke and Mirrors (2016), which fills the furthest room of the exhibition. The contrast is stark. Where Clusterfkk’s energetic narratives impel you from one work to the next, here Hoffie invites us to linger over 18 monochromatic ink and gouache works that bleed across the page. It takes less than a moment for the smoky forms to reveal themselves as depictions of terrifying journeys across the ocean. Hung so the horizon is roughly level across the series, Smoke and Mirrors is a visceral, atmospheric gut punch. We know these images; we’ve heard the screams and seen the fear-etched faces on the news. Standing in front of them, I can almost smell the oil slicks burning above the waves. Hoffie’s distain for the government of that time is palpable. Yet the works retain an organic fluidity and traces of the media’s evaporation, suggesting that much of the composition was left to chance.

We walk back towards the gallery entrance, reflecting on how this mess we’re in continues to reflect the world’s confusion. I point to a depiction of Hoffie’s daughter in Clusterfkk, tentatively offering that the artist’s inclusion of the next generation might also reveal her hopes for the future, despite the chaos?

She smiles, her eyes sparkling. “There’s got to be hope at some point. What are we doing it for, if not?”

First published in Vault Magazine, Issue 45, 2024