28 29 ARTLINES 3 | 2025 I HAVE LOVED/I LOVE/I WILL LOVE This current body of work is richly attuned to a long, entangled history of art and conflict. Are there any artists or moments in art history that you feel have informed it? While I’m troubled by the fact that each image from the world’s current conflicts, seen via social media, can be disposed of so immediately, I also realised that, equally, I can’t ‘un-see’ a single image of Goya’s Disasters of War series, for example. There are more. Plenty more. Picasso’s Guernica 1937, Beckmann’s The Departure 1932–35 and so on. Those images seem to somehow live viscerally in the body. They kind of hang around and infect and influence our capacity to think more deeply, or more slowly, about conflict and suffering. The realisation made me wonder whether art might still retain a capacity to slow down how we apprehend imagery, how we take it in for questioning, as it were. So, I became interested in attempting to decelerate the processes of both making and viewing images of these contemporary crises and conflicts. As an artist, you’ve mentioned that you create art to work through your questions and emotions in response to confronting events like war. Have your feelings about war and conflict changed throughout this project? Has this body of work caused any internal shifts for you? On a personal level, I can say that this series has taken its share of emotional skin, but it’s too early to say whether it’s changed my feelings in any way. I mean, there are artists and writers who’ve taken me closer to apprehending the full horror of conflict. Cormac McCarthy stands preeminent there, for me. His capacity to look directly at the horror of what we’re capable of as a species is extraordinary. In his 1985 novel Blood Meridian, the character Judge Holden says: ‘War is the Finally, your work invites viewers to pause on images they are used to seeing, albeit fleetingly in the media, and to foster emotional reflection and empathetic connections. How do you hope viewers of ‘I have loved/I love/I will love’ think about human conflict after seeing your work? How would you like them to approach war imagery in future? I guess I just leave it up to the art to either do the work or not, as the case may be. Once I’ve made an artwork, I don’t have any control about what it might be capable of doing when it’s ‘out in the world’. But I’m interested in whether art retains the capacity to hold a viewer for a bit longer, curious to see whether the ‘slowness’ of gallery-viewing might afford the viewer a little more time to see continuities between things that might once have seemed divisive. In terms of ‘hope’, my hope is that the art might provide a kind of punctum — a ‘pierce-through’ that makes you stop for a bit, makes you slow down — and that it suggests a space in which people can turn towards each other and take up a dialogue, converse, discuss. To question and ponder. To realise that we can each be identified as a perpetrator or a victim, depending on the point of view. And, maybe, to realise that beyond all this, there’s a deeper level, at which we all share each other’s grief. Grace Jeremy is Assistant Curator, Australian Art. She spoke with Pat Hoffie in March. ‘Pat Hoffie: I have loved/I love/I will love’ is in Gallery 14, QAG, until 1 February 2026. See the exhibition in more detail via its digital exhibition story at collection.qagoma. qld.gov.au/page/hoffie Above, from left Francisco Goya / ‘Nada. Ello dira’ (plate 69 from ‘Desastres de la guerra’ series) (‘Nothing. It speaks for itself’ (plate 69 from ‘The disasters of war’ series)) 1810, published 1863 / Purchased 1989. QAG Foundation; and Pat Hoffie / Image from ‘I have loved/I love/I will love’, 2025 / Courtesy: The artist / © Pat Hoffie / Photograph: Nina White ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god’. McCarthy’s convictions are difficult to face down. Then there’s Dostoevsky. Conrad. Melville. The Old Testament. The Qur’an. History. Conflict of some kind is central to all of them. Although Sun-Tsu’s The Art of War was written somewhere between 475 and 221 BCE, it remains pertinent today. The more I keep reading and looking, the more complex things seem, and the more difficult it is to take any single fixed position. Art still retains a power to shift me to see things in ways that are infinitely more nuanced than my initial knee-jerk reactions; and art furnishes me with information that makes it far less likely to reduce issues into simple binaries, like ‘us and them’. Like [North American painter] Leon Golub said, ‘I am both the aggressor and the victim’ in these works. Right, from top Pat Hoffie / Image from ‘I have loved/ I love/I will love’, 2025 / Courtesy: The artist / © Pat Hoffie / Photograph: Nina White; and artist Pat Hoffie with Samantha Shellard, Conservator (Works on Paper), in the conservation lab at QAG, July 2025 / Photograph: Joe Ruckli
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