Hi-Vis

2022

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“The Hi-Vis series featured workers working their way towards reframing the landscape. I started the series after a roadtrip to the Flinders Ranges – it occurred to me that all the Hi-Vis workers have become so big a part of how we think of the ‘outdoors’.” - Pat Hoffie

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“… the subject of ‘work’ has been an important theme within Pat Hoffie’s practice for some decades. The exhibition Hi-Vis is part of that ongoing focus. The large paintings feature construction workers building frameworks across and within the Australian landscape. The idea of ‘landscape’ or ‘Country’ is a contested topic in Australia; nowhere more passionately fought over than in North Queensland, where battles over the rights to mine for coal, coal seam gas, fossil fuels, uranium and minerals have repeatedly divided the nation. Yet the rising interest in environmental consciousness has tended to ignore the problems that emerge when the idea of landscape that describes nature as a ‘constructed site’ is separated from the idea of an ‘untouched wilderness’, rather than the product of tens of thousands of years of cultural belief systems based on Indigenous agricultural practices. This body of work situates working men and women in the process of actively re-constructing and re-structuring their environment; it raises questions about the ongoing interactions between people and place, and the outcomes and consequences of how we re-imagine our relationships to Country.”