Tom O'Hern - Overview | Bett Gallery

"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.

This approach has seen his work appear in solo and group exhibitions in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart, and on the front of publications. He’s done residences in Hobart, Queenstown, Paris and Shan Xi. And his works collected by major insitutions including MONA - Museum of Old & New Art, Artbank and Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery to name a few.

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Tom O’Hern is probably one of the most well-recognised artists in Tasmania right now. This is by a kind of design, as he spent a lot of time making work that ended up on the streets of Hobart – indeed there was a moment, perhaps a decade back, where his distinct line and bold TOM signature seemed near ubiquitous. O’Hern made stickers that gave faces to all kinds of public instalments, he drew on nearly any surface he could find, he made stickers of skulls, came up with slogans and just kept going, in a near relentless campaign to mark the city of Hobart with a mess of his own making. Tom’s style of drawing evolved as he went along in an interesting way: when I first encountered his work at Hunter Street, it was a lot more detailed and meticulous, more classically illustrative, and somehow prettier, despite some relatively gruesome subject matter. His gradual shift in style is interesting, as you could say his work became simpler, but that’s not exactly right. Rather his style loosened and his need for realism was slowly ejected for a more chaotic style that has the primitive sophistication one used to find in things like medieval illuminated texts. In these you can find, should you search, all manner of odd and feral beings that are often taking a crap, as Tom O’Hern’s creatures are, or are somewhat oddly demonic entities, like Tom O’Hern’s creatures are.

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.

Andrew Harper, Make & Do, July 2023

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