An interview with Pat Hoffie
Pat Hoffie's ten year survey show, a margin for error, opened at Brisbane City Gallery in late September, aptly coinciding with The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. I say apt, because the practice of this artist and writer has consistently concerned itself with transcultural dialogues, particularly with respect to Asia, and she has had a keen eye for wilful mistranslations of the dominant system. She herself has entered the 'messy' terrain of deliberate mistranslation, creating hybrid imagery which fluxes and morphs to a 'different drum'. Always the polemicist, Hoffie resists neat categorisation. She can be described as a painter, installation artist, a practitioner in multi-media technology, a collaborator with other artists, a teacher and commentator. All of these activities serve her position as a cultural activist who believes in problematising art-making, loosening it up to possibilities which are difficult to assess with the tools of Western theoretical discourse. I spoke to Pat Hoffie at her exhibition on 1 October 1996.
Anne Kirker Why the title 'a margin for error'?
Pat Hoffie I chose the title partly because the notion of 'margins' and 'peripheries' is so popular in recent theory. But there are other more local connections; when you go back in your mind to childhood, to school books, there was always that margin on the edge of the page where you were corrected by the teacher if you got something wrong. This was often the source of your greatest disappointment. It was also the source of some of the funniest things—the ways you got things wrong, sometimes consistently, often became the kind of idiosyncrasies that eventually make for style or a new... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline