"Tom O’Hern is probably one of the most well-recognised artists in Tasmania right now"
O’Hern describes with a strange fondness those lost parts of suburbia where weeds choke unpopular infrastructure. Blackberries, hemlock, willows—those stranglers of drains, signposts and rubbish—poisonous and picturesque foxgloves, peering over smashed glass and cokes cans and stolen bikes. His monster drawings evolve the same way, exploding across the paper rhizomatically, as if roots direct routes in some kind of cell-splitting, replicating, cloning, swarming, breeding…
…but O’Hern’s monsters are not monstrous. The monstrous, like the abject, includes in its own expression the desire by others to cast it out, to reject or to escape it. O’Hern’s monsters are not sinister, they’re comical: full of fractured smiles that are full of fractal tracks of sharp teeth; thousands of wall eyes, they look like they’re laughing. But they’re not quite hysterical either, the artist’s command of his medium is too convincing; there is no loss of control.
Perhaps it is the artist’s work to tame the monstrous? Like the child in a Patrick White novel who both fears and reveres a cascading monstera deliciosa; his every humiliation is caught in the thousand eyes of his own delicious monster.
I think as the strictness of realism was shed, Tom’s output became more tinged with metaphor and idea, although it’s still also about the sheer expressive joy of drawing weird looking stuff. Tom draws what he likes, and what he likes is comically grotesque. It’s just that that’s not all it is. There are two undercurrents I’ve started to identify. One is a kind of occult symbology that may have simply come from an investigation of older images of demonic entities, which is interesting enough in itself, because you could see this as placing O’Hern in a tradition that stretches back centuries and takes in artists like Bosch and Breughel. O’Hern does have fun examining the traditions of the grotesque, and it does link him as well to strains of underground art and non-traditional sources of imagery – like comics or the heavy metal genre. This isn’t so pronounced, but it is there in the mix, and it makes O’Hern more interesting when you realise he’s a magpie who has studied quite widely, and that part of what he’s doing is paying homage to one of the longest running veins of art.