Land Holds Memories
2021 to 2023
Pat Hoffie was invited to join Peter Hudson, Euan Macleod and Joe Furlonger with Aboriginal singer/songwriter Kev Carmody on painting camps at the Bunya Mountains National Park, Giraween National Park and Carnarvon National Park over the following three years. (Joanne Currie participated in the initial Bunya Mountains camp). Hoffie developed a series of large-scale works from the smaller images, photographs and notes she produced on-site. The focus of this series reflected on the problems of challenging the approaches of a northern hemisphere ‘landscape tradition’ in the face of Australia’s growing awareness of the idea of ‘Country’. Many titles of the work were drawn from ophthalmological descriptions of failures in the capacity to see, and the surfaces of the work are detailed with a visual continuity that enmeshes subject, object, people and place into a kind of continuum.
