DAVID HEARNE
AUSTRALIAN ARTIST
Tasmanian Gothic
The Visceral Mark: A Reflection on Practice
To paint the figure and the landscape is to challenge perception. Since the 1980s, my practice has been shaped by a relentless pursuit of emotional purity—a journey born from riding rough terrain with a motorcycle full of canvas, navigating gallery censorship, selling art in Sydney on a shoestring budget, and dedicating years to mentoring art students.
My work lives in the difficult spaces of the human psyche, using body language and loose forms to navigate complex emotions. Mark-making is the anchor. It is a cathartic, visceral act where scratches, textures, and gestural lines give rise to awkward faces and distorted, wild creatures.
My recent work bridges the physical and the digital, transcribing 1988 VHS performance art through modern AI firmware. This evolution culminated in 'AI Now', Australia's pioneering exhibition of AI-coded performance art.
Pasted, painted, and revisited, these fragmented layers ask a final question: where does the material end, and true emotional transformation begin?
David Hearne Art Statement for his 2024 exhibition in the Sidespace Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Visual Arts is here! Can an artwork of an imagined digital portrait of an imaginary person be used as a digital identity? If I prompt software to create a portrait that looks like me, but is not me, can I use it as my identifying photo on a passport (for example)? Who or what will become the arbiter between the real world and imagined world of visual imagery, especially if it involves a digital identity? Does AI have a place, have value adding or belong to a niche or ‘ism’ in the contemporary art world? The work in this 2024 exhibition explores the theme of portraiture using artificial intelligence to help assist and create imagined portraits. Each work is presented as a Digital A1 size print. The work is bold, colourful and heavily stylised. Word prompts are used to create all the digital portrait artwork. To make a group of artworks stylised, I have used specific word prompts repetitively on different artworks to achieve a similar cohesive balance between each work. Word motifs are integral in the creation of the artwork and can be repeated in different works to represent (for example) a fluoro colour or an application of line. Using this formula, I hope to celebrate, colourful, stylised, over realistic, AI digital portraits. Words become the palette and using your existing arts experiences and skills, one can further edit the words chosen and alter them based on your own knowledge of the visual arts codes and conventions. This assists improvements to the picture plane, colours, style and subject. This secondary application to the word prompt helps stylise, compose or integrate any specific design element required to make your AI digital portrait more striking, stunning or iconic. My Artist statement becomes a statement based on the questions I have posed regarding AI’s role in the art process. I hope the big questions such as the how, why and when, should AI, be used in the Visual Arts be given due thought. As well, continue the debate going whether an AI created portrait has currency versus a real world photographic or digital portrait.
Tasmanian Gothic Exhibition Hobart
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