Barbara Hocker
Bolton, Connecticut
Bolton, Connecticut
Bio: Barbara Hocker has been exhibiting mixed-media artwork locally and regionally for more than twenty-five years. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, most recently the Memorial Sloan Kettering family of hospitals in New York and New Jersey. For the past six years, the artist has been experimenting in her practice with the book form. Hocker’s book work has been enhanced and supported by grants from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation in Hartford CT and the Artist Resource Trust, Berkshire Taconic Foundation in Massachusetts. Hocker has a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford CT in 2019.
Statement: My artistic practice is part of my overall spiritual path. In integration with yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation, my artwork is an outward physical expression and communication of inner, subjective experience. My work is meant to be intimate, purposely unsettled, and imperfect, invoking association, resonance, sensuousness, and metaphor to create poetic images and objects. Combining digital photography, printmaking, ink, encaustic, and, occasionally, poetry with textile sensibilities and techniques, I make books, installations, and wall pieces. I tend to work in series and am interested in repetition in both conception and process as a way to bring meditation practice into the studio.
The two books in this exhibition display two interpretations of the concertina binding. River Book II: Light & Shadow is a soft-cover concertina binding with signatures pamphlet-stitched into the valley folds on both sides of the concertina spine. This book has no text and is intended to evoke sunlight and shadows playing on water. The folded concertina spine can be opened and manipulated to suggest the river form. Blackledge Falls uses the same concertina (accordion-folded) spine in a very different way. The hard-cover book features single flag pages glued to one side of each folded spread of the spine. The book can be leafed through page by page or hung on the wall fully opened to evoke the water cascading down the hill as described in the included poem. These two books are part of an ongoing series referencing water.
Statement: My artistic practice is part of my overall spiritual path. In integration with yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation, my artwork is an outward physical expression and communication of inner, subjective experience. My work is meant to be intimate, purposely unsettled, and imperfect, invoking association, resonance, sensuousness, and metaphor to create poetic images and objects. Combining digital photography, printmaking, ink, encaustic, and, occasionally, poetry with textile sensibilities and techniques, I make books, installations, and wall pieces. I tend to work in series and am interested in repetition in both conception and process as a way to bring meditation practice into the studio.
The two books in this exhibition display two interpretations of the concertina binding. River Book II: Light & Shadow is a soft-cover concertina binding with signatures pamphlet-stitched into the valley folds on both sides of the concertina spine. This book has no text and is intended to evoke sunlight and shadows playing on water. The folded concertina spine can be opened and manipulated to suggest the river form. Blackledge Falls uses the same concertina (accordion-folded) spine in a very different way. The hard-cover book features single flag pages glued to one side of each folded spread of the spine. The book can be leafed through page by page or hung on the wall fully opened to evoke the water cascading down the hill as described in the included poem. These two books are part of an ongoing series referencing water.