Tom O'Hern: Hell Pig

Hell Pig.

I’ve been thinking about mechanical megafauna rolling around and eating up all the marsupials and cutting up all the hills for roads and the sprawl. A hell pig or entelledont, an ancient pig beast from Europe the size of a hilux with big crocodile jaws. 

I’ve been thinking about all the animals we’ve introduced and the continents of North and South America crashing together three million years ago.The plants of Europe have all been trained by glaciers to colonise bare earth and the side of the road getting sprayed pink, green and blue.

I’ve been thinking about the big boulders we chuck everywhere to stop people doing doughies and how they look like sort of like stonehenge or something.

I’ve been thinking about getting tailgated by this car with one headlight and in the mirror how it looked like a big skull with one eye."

Tom O'Hern, 2023

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.