Hope by way of melancholia: Gay Hawkes’s ‘The House of Longing’
/
As a device for confronting painful and elegiac subject matter, humour can inform postures of resilience and allow for hope to take root. Be it furniture design, painting, dolewave or jazz piano, creative toil informed by a comic sensibility can often provide for the amelioration and navigation of pain.
Currently on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), ‘The House of Longing’ is an exhibition celebrating the multifaceted practice of lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist Gay Hawkes. It is the most recent in an exhibition series highlighting living lutruwita/Tasmania-based practices and was preceded by presentations from David Keeling, Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway), Patrick Hall and Philip Wolfhagen.
Bordering on a retrospective in its depth and scope, ‘The House of Longing’ collates a vast multitude of work drawn from across Hawkes’s storied career. It is fragmented into two distinct sections, before and after the 2013 bushfires which devastated much of the Turrakana/Tasman Peninsula, including Hawkes’s Dunalley house and boatshed studio, along with an assortment of precious tools and an irreplaceable collection of her life’s work.
The exhibition highlights Hawkes’s attuned practice of blending approaches to furniture, sculpture, collage, education and painting with remarkable consideration. Throughout her career, Hawkes has skilfully collapsed the oft-reductive distinctions between these approaches. Much of the wisdom embodied in ‘The House of Longing’ resides in the value that Hawkes affords the interdependence of form, material and narrative.
Almost a form of collage, Hawkes’s anthropomorphic furniture and nativity-like sculptural works are dotted with pop-cultural references and absurdist narrative inventions including Princess Diana embodying a missile, Elle Macpherson as a chook and Collingwood Football Club’s premiership victory in 1990. In Collingwood Premiership Cupboard (1991), Hawkes lovingly lampoons the religious fanaticism and pious reverence of Melbourne’s AFL community for their game. The work is indicative of how themes imbued with melancholia and religiosity are met with gentle irreverence, joviality and a persistent sense of humour, the importance of which becomes clearer as the exhibition progresses.
Central to ‘The House of Longing’ is a video work by celebrated local filmmaker Roger Scholes, who sadly passed away in June this year. Among his many other achievements, Scholes is renowned for being the only Tasmanian to have won a critics’ prize at the Venice Film Festival, for The Tale of Ruby Rose in 1987. Taken shortly before the Dunalley fires, Scholes’s video documents Hawkes working alongside a group of young children in her boatshed studio which she dubbed ‘the Dunalley Children’s Chair Factory’. As a teacher, Hawkes taught her students to build objects and toys from found and recycled materials. In addition to illustrating her generosity of spirit as an artist and teacher, Scholes’s video can also be seen to anchor the primary gallery spaces, providing visitors with a precious moment of stillness and quiet contemplation in the midst of Hawkes’s elaborate exhibition, which also includes a number of absorbing paintings to emerge from residencies in Armenia and Georgia.
Of the many lessons found in ‘The House of Longing’, what resonates most strongly is the crucial role of showing humour in the face of loss and hardship, wherever possible. Its ability to provide levity and reaffirm resilience is a deeply valuable tool that informs much of what we do and who we are.
Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart
Curated by Jane Stewart and Peter Hughes, ‘Gay Hawkes: The House of Longing’ is currently on display at TMAG, nipaluna/Hobart, until 28 August 2022.
