Contempt Free Hart/Contemporary Art
Umbrella Studio’s walls shout out with images and phrases in this exhibition of paintings by Gordon Hookey. The colours are bright, loud—like advertising—and the phrases are rude, crude and funny.
Looking at Gordon Hookey’s work one could gain the impression that he is an angry young man, but on closer acquaintance he appears to be friendly and mild-mannered. His childhood in Cloncurry imbued him with both the resourcefulness and the friendliness of the western Queensland lifestyle. I spoke to him at length when he was artist in residence in the month preceding this exhibition. So where do those rude/crude phrases originate, words that remain taboo in polite society? Of Waanyi ancestry, Hookey sees Waanyi is his first language although he was denied the opportunity to learn it extensively. So English is his second language and it is easier to use bad language in a second rather than a first language. Coming from a non–English speaking background myself, I know the difference in emotional valency between a first and second language. Swearing in English for me is just a formality, but swearing in my first language brings all that baggage of taboo and scandal, levels of offensiveness carefully calibrated since childhood. This positioning of English as his second language liberated Hookey from any restrictive baggage: ‘using swear words is just a formality, we use them all the time’. Removed from their emotional potency, words and phrases can be played with like Lego blocks, their phonetic and semiotic content juxtaposed and disrupted. Hookey says that images and words trigger each other in his head; paintings grow from phrases, and in turn other images grow from these phrases and find their way in