Two impacts – Live theatre and a visual art installation.
The impact of real time “hard copy” art in public galleries/museums and live theatre that are not on screens as memories cannot be overstated. They will be ignored to our peril and need to be overstated. I feel more emboldened and in new spaces since experiencing “So Many Splintered Parts” and “I have loved/I love/I will love”. Artists are essential to life, recovery and the endless rebirth of universal values that will feed the evolution of robust “good” societies.
Photo taken by Peter Breen at Art Gallery of Queensland, August 31, 2025.
So Many Splintered Parts is a 7 act play performed by two young actors at Queensland Theatre’s South Brisbane Montague Road centre. It is a story of and for the evolution of understanding our times. Written by 7 different playwrights around their commission, it flowed with a mininalist set and live music by composer and well known Brisbane musician/performer Tyrone Noonan. [ Seen August 23, 2025]
“What do you see when you look out at the world? What does the world see when it looks back at us? This is the provocation we put to the seven writers we approached to be part of the project. What they delivered in response is a collection written for now, a gathering that tackles themes of identity, survival, digital culture, class and wealth, mental illness, violence and war – the fractures running through contemporary Australia and the world.” [ From the hand out guide].
It is not lost on me that a young world is asking such questions and commissioning such public inquiries. Outside of intelligent and on task academia, art is where such inquiries are best commissioned and made. Academia has – one would hope in this day of user pays tertiary education – a flow on effect but the arts in the broadest sense, unfettered and without limits or censorship and as public events and experiences, are the classrooms, pulpits and mills where the grist is cast in. Screen online desensitised endorphin overloads excite, shock or provoke click bait buyer regret but never the depth required for change. The change needed is long and evolutionary and as Viktor Frankl says so cogently
I have loved, I love, I will love is Pat Hoffie’s latest installation at the Art Gallery of Queensland. Pat is a Brisbane based artist, educator and author and though now retired from Queensland College of Art and Design [QCAD] has just embarked on a new art making project ending with this remarkable work. Undertaking printmaking at the invitation of master print maker and academic Dr Tim Mosely in 2024, Pat – primarily a painter* – found herself leaving aside her first ideas of what to print replaced by the impact of the endless stories via social and other media around Palestine, Ukraine and more.
“I wanted to slow some of these images down. To decelerate them. To termporarily detain them. Though each of them shocked and sickened me, I could all-too-easily-instantly forget them. And yet, it occurred to me, I had never been able to un-see a Goya.” [ From the forward of her 2025 self-published book “I have loved, I love, I will love”]
The exhibition of a selection of massive digitised prints from the prints she made as she referenced Goya and Kollwitz plus the huge installation of ladders, mirrors and detritus created for me a post crucifixion moment. Shadows of figures abusing, killing, dying are not newstories to repost or return to or save. The work made and curated is brilliant, a screaming silence that evokes almost a prostrate response and a return visit. Silence slipped in unannounced in my moments in the space, calling me to return.
This and the theatre say at least that art might not bring immediate change to the world but it asks the questions and opens doors to the silence where mystery dwells for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see beyond screen time.
Peter Breen. Brisbane. September 3, 2025.
Artist : Peter Breen
Mixed media on 2 x Encyclopedia Pages
*Pat Hoffie’s artistic practice has extended through exhibitions, collaborative cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural undertakings, publishing, education and advocacy since the 1970s. Trained as a painter, she also works with sculpture, installation, print media, drawing and video. Core to all areas of her practice is an examination of power, value, the importance of ‘place’ and the necessity of cultural diversity. In the 1980s and 90s, Hoffie’s interest in feminism’s critique of power and privilege contributed to a range of exhibitions, projects and publications that attracted national recognition. Her advocacy and support for women artists continues to the present through her writing, curating and commitment to projects in Australia and abroad. Since 1993, the artist has maintained a research focus on the inequities and inconsistencies of global cultural exchange through iterations of her ongoing ‘Fully Exploited Labour’ series. Informed by postcolonial analysis, her work has involved her first-hand participation in experimental practices across the region, where she has initiated and participated in a range of international projects and residencies. She has been described as “a leading figure in establishing cross-cultural dialogue with artists, collectives and colleges in the region”, and has been recognised for her contributions to the arts in Australia (AM) and for her contributions to tertiary scholarship in the visual arts (Professor Emeritus). Her artwork has been included in leading exhibitions, collections, and events in Australia and overseas.
Hoffie’s recent works reflect the deep scars of chaos and trauma that have become part of our everyday socially mediated world. Both personal as well as political, they are funny and tragic, idiosyncratic yet bound to the historical traditions of the ‘epic’.
www.pat-hoffie.com
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