Interviewed by Graham Coulter-Smith
GRAHAM COULTER-SMITHSorry to bring up ancient history, but I was just looking again at George Petelin’s review of your work in eyeline 1 where he talks about your dealing with the theme of the eternal feminine. He said that you are looking at women above and beyond historical change. I just wonder if this is really the sort of thing you are trying to do in your work?
PAT HOFFIEHe is just seeing women as having to be either/or, as having to be in one camp or the other. He needn't say "women", he could say "individual" instead; as soon as he says "women" I've automatically been categorised and put into a frame I'm trying to avoid. And as far as the eternal feminine is concerned, attempts to set women within a historical framework become very difficult because there is, in fact, no women's history. We do have images of women, and that's been part of my drawings, an attempt to look at precedents and draw certain parallels with the present, but I'm certainly not setting up a myth of women or eternal feminine values. And Petelin's review doesn't consider the ironic questioning which I would hope the titles would reveal, and the images, if they were looked at closer.
GRAHAM COULTER-SMITHSo you are ironising the myth of the eternal feminine?
PAT HOFFIEYes, they can be taken as being essentially masculine representations of women. But they also engage a number of levels of meaning. I'm interested in Baudrillard’s notion of seduction, which he describes as an indefinable condition where when you think you have finally grasped something it suddenly becomes something else.
GRAHAM COULTER-SMITHSo in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Pat Hoffie, Detail, Alchemy (An Experiment in Relatedness), 1987
