Family Birthday (QLD)
Pat Hoffie
- Sitter: Self Portrait
- Medium: Oil on Canvas
- Dimensions: 130cm x 178cm
- Representation: FireWorks Gallery
- Categories: Female artist
2026 Lord Mayor's Prize
Proudly supported by
Brisbane City Council
About the artwork
Gathered on a deck in the Queensland sunshine, under a massive lilly pilly tree, Pat Hoffie celebrated her father’s 101st birthday alongside her 98-year-old mother. “The fact that they still live independently together,” Hoffie notes, “has far more to do with how they work as a team than any mysterious gene pool.” Her contribution to the celebration: handmade paper hats, which get bigger and more ridiculous every year.
The figures hover, ghostlike, disappearing into the Belgian linen, above a foreground that is vivid and graspable. A pavlova sits laden with fruit, passionfruit seeds spilling over the edges in pools, unmistakably Queensland, ripe and bright and celebratory. The too-real fruit and the barely-there figures sit in quiet contrast, a reminder that nothing is permanent. “People at that age are fragile,” says Hoffie, “we’re all fragile.” Humour, presence and impermanence, held together in the same frame.
About the artist
Pat Hoffie AM is one of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists, based in Brisbane. A Professor Emerita of Griffith University, her cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, sculpture and assemblage. Exhibiting since 1974, her work addresses themes of power, post-colonial legacies and cultural diversity. She has held positions on the Australia Council for the Arts and the National Association of the Visual Arts.
Judges Notes
Pat Hoffie’s Family Birthday (QLD) is bright, vibrant and graphically sumptuous image of the artist and her parents at her father’s 101st birthday celebration. The piece, which leans as much on the artist’s skills in drawing as in painting, works to conveys a happy and intimate moment between people in a lush backdrop, with its unfolding green suggestions of trees, the hats, the birthday pavlova heaped with fruit.
The work itself plays with its photographic origins and the push and pull between painting, drawing and photography in the image making process. There are passages that demonstrate affiliations to each, but the whole is united through the breezy markmaking and familiar composition.
As so often happens in Queensland and in the art of Queensland artists, the colour is dialed up several notches to create a sense of fecund verdance and humidity, as well as a visual response to our very bright natural light. I imagine there would be a temptation to keep working certain details, but the artist has left the work at exactly the right moment. If painting has an equivalent for photography’s punctum, this might be it.
This image shows great tenderness and emphasizes the necessity of family and relationships in a time where they’re needed more than ever.
Jonathan McBurnie
Director, Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery (Launceston)
Chief Judge 2026
