Pat Hoffie: Artefacts from a bigger picture

Pat Hoffie: Artefacts from a Bigger Picture explores the gulfs between human connection and social alienation. Investigating the invisible currents that either bind us together or keep us fundamentally apart, Hoffie raises questions about the impact of our environments on collective empathy. Each monotype is a unique record of this gulf created through ink and paper, with painted and drawn interventions extending the hand printed surface. Intimate in scale, the works draw immense global circumstances into close proximity with the viewer. Images capturing the raw interdependence of people brought into close, visceral proximity sit alongside images reflecting the distance, isolation and mutual indifference of human interaction in modern public spaces. Across the body of work, dense, gestural passages sit in exchange with areas that feel cool and detached. Figures gather as clusters of inky marks, contained or divided by clean architectural lines. By bringing these contrasting realities together, Artefacts from a Bigger Picture shifts our attention beyond the immediate frame of each work to question the nature of human interaction and interdependence. Drawing on printmaking’s history as a form of political address, Hoffie asks whether an image can arrest our attention for long enough to consider our own place.

Listed by PARKER Contemporary