26 27 ARTLINES 3 | 2025 I HAVE LOVED/I LOVE/I WILL LOVE There’s more, and I guess the thing that all of these print-referencing works hold in common is my ongoing interest in the impact that the massive shifts in print media have had, on both the production and reception of visual imagery: the speed, the sheer scale, the association with technological developments that have all been part of military expansion. Also, the capacity of print to shatter ideas about the ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of ‘handmade’ art production. The seriality and speed of print also challenges notions of truth, while the communal nature of print production challenges ideas about the isolation and heroic nature of the artist–genius. For this current series, I’ve been using printing materials and processes that are extremely old. Old and simple. Old and slow to make. Also slow to look at . . . and they require the support of a close community to bring them into being. For this project, you have worked with found images of current global conflicts that you have witnessed through the media, and you must have seen thousands of images during your research. Were there any kinds of images you were particularly drawn to? What stuck in your mind? Well, it didn’t take any effort to ‘find’ them! No one could have escaped the relentless onslaught of these images of crisis and warfare over the past eighteen months. When I started the residency in 2024, I had a very different idea in mind . . . But I just couldn’t move away from the images that were haunting every aspect of life during that time. I can’t say I was drawn to any of them; rather, I was appalled by what was happening, and how quickly those images were disposed of as ‘yesterday’s news’. Images that were incredibly challenging and harrowing became instantly forgotten, replaced by the mounting rubble of the following day’s image onslaught. And the next and the next. The slew of images became an ongoing part of the fabric of daily lived experience — a kind of emotional incarceration that kept building up, in a suffocating way, above and around the banality of quotidian life. Those of us who are a long way from what’s called ‘the front line’ are nevertheless implicated in these zones of global conflict, and we’re all part of what seems like unbearable grief, and a sense of utter powerlessness to affect any positive change. The overwhelming inundation of that visual onslaught moves people to either ‘take sides’, in reductive and, ultimately, dangerous ways, or to go numb. Above Pat Hoffie / Image from ‘I have loved/I love/ I will love’, 2025 / Courtesy: The artist / © Pat Hoffie / Photograph: Nina White Opposite Pat Hoffie / Images from a limited edition of 5 from the MMXXIV folio box, printed at Cobalt Editions, 2024 / Courtesy: The artist / © Pat Hoffie / Photographs: Nina White
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