Gordon Hogan: ‘I went from being a young lad in Ireland to hanging out with Holocaust survivors’
Gordon Hogan currently has an exhibition at the Source Arts Centre in Thurles.
Central to Gordon Hogan’s Exploding View exhibition at the Source Arts Centre in Thurles, Co Tipperary is a model of a church, suspended in mid-air on a wooden frame. While many artists of his generation – Hogan was born in 1978 – have come to regard organised religion with indifference or scorn, his own attitude is more measured.
“Religion is a huge part of my work,” he says. “My father was Catholic, and my mother Protestant. They always had a kind of humourous approach to religion. My dad went to church when we were kids, because he was a builder, and that was where you’d meet people and get jobs. Other than that, my family was never religious, and yet I became an altar boy, and got really into the whole thing. My mother used to make fun of me for that.”
Part of the attraction, he says, was the scale of the Church of the Sacred Heart in his native Templemore. “The church is probably the right size for a town ten times the size,” he says. “It's just completely exaggerated; it’s spectacular. And I've always found that kind of religious propaganda to be really interesting.”
Hogan no longer attends services. “I'm an atheist,” he says. “But there’s almost this thing of, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's funny, but at the exhibition opening, everyone was like, ‘I'm not really religious, but I love churches.’ So I’m kind of playing with that concept. I think this is the fifth church I've built, but I've never gotten anywhere near this kind of scale before.
"It’s like scratching an itch; I wanted to lift up the church and turn it into an object, so that the building becomes something to look at, rather than something to be occupied. I was just fascinated by what that might look like.”
Exploding View also features videos and photographic prints, and a series of sculptural assemblages of wood and paint, all of which relate in some way to the Church sculpture. “I like physically making things,” says Hogan. “My brothers would get quite a laugh out of this, because they’re proper tradesmen, just like my late father, whereas I’m the guy with the soft hands who does the expressive stuff.”
Exploding View is Hogan’s first solo exhibition, and the first time he has ever shown his work in Ireland. “Originally I went to Limerick School of Art and Design,” he says. “But in my second year, I went on a student exchange to Munich, in Germany. It was only a half-semester, an Erasmus thing, but after three months there, I decided to stay.”
Munich was not an easy place to live, he says. “I actually found it extremely brutal. Germans don't have much sympathy for anyone, you know what I mean? But I just got on with it. I spent about six months working, and then I got into the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as a full-time student. I was there for six years, completing my degree in 2006.”
Like many artists, Gordon Hogan did all kinds of work to support himself. Bar jobs and stints as a builder’s labourer were par for the course, but his longest occupation was as a tour guide at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Established in 1933, Dachau was the very first Nazi concentration camp, and at least 41,500 were murdered there before its liberation by US forces in April 1945.
Any number of artists have made work about the Holocaust, but Hogan is not about to do so. “I have an ethical point on this,” he says. “I would never make work about Dachau because it's not my story, I was never imprisoned there. My story is that I worked at Dachau as a guide, which is very different. I went through the experience of being a young lad from a housing estate in Ireland, hanging out with Holocaust survivors, and that's an amazing story in itself.”
While Dachau will always be associated with the horrors of Nazism, the city itself is impressive, he says.
“Dachau is 1,300 years old, and it has a certain aesthetic. It’s kind of like Cashel; there’s a big rock in the middle with a castle on top. It was actually a huge place for romantic landscape painters in the mid- to late 1800s. There was a whole artistic colony, with a lot of French artists, in particular.”
Hogan worked at the Dachau Memorial Site for twelve years before returning to Tipperary with his German-born wife, an artist and graphic designer, in 2019. The couple had bought a derelict cottage, and Hogan had been fixing it up on his visits home to see his mother, who has since passed on. As well as restoring the house, he repurposed the shed beside it as his workshop cum studio.
Hogan occasionally showed work in group shows in Germany, and one of his video pieces was selected by the British musician and multi-media artist Brian Eno for a screening in Los Angeles in 2020. But it is only in the past few years that he has really found his focus.
“I was one of those who got the Basic Income for Artists, which has been an absolute blessing,” he says. “It’s allowed me to work full-time at my art.”
With his first solo exhibition under his belt, Hogan has hopes of organising exchanges with some of his artist friends in Munich. “I’d like to get funding to bring some of them over to exhibit here, and then bring that back to Germany,” he says. “But my main goal is to keep making my own art. I’d like to conceive even bigger exhibitions, and see what develops out of that.”
- Gordon Hogan, Exploding View runs at the Source Arts Centre in Thurles, Co Tipperary, until January 20, 2024.
- thesourceartscentre.ie
- gordonhogan.com
