Gallery View: Photo credit: Dayle Doherty
Reception for the Artists:
Friday, August 13th, 5—6:30 pm
In When We Were Trees, Linda Hoffman and her daughter, Ariel Matisse demonstrate through the mutuality and interconnectedness of their art how women empower each other when they connect with nature, trees, and their own bodies.
When We Were Trees, opens with Linda Hoffman’s sculpture of “Eve”, the fallen woman, unable to resist the tantalizing offer of the serpent, condemned for thousands of years because of this transgression. Hoffman believes there is a different story. Hoffman’s Eve wanted to know the truth about who she was and the meaning of her life. She tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge for her own self-discovery.
The exhibit features individual work such as Matisse’s “Willow” and Hoffman’s “Birthing Tree”, as well as collaborative pieces like, “Tangled Up in Trees”, and groupings of sculptures where each artist takes up a theme such as “hands” and the “female body.”
The wall sculpture, “Grafting a Life”, is a large grafted “tree” and the first sculpture they worked on together, the one that led Matisse towards her signature medium of wire. The diversity of women depicted by Matisse in her small wire sculptures show how each finds their own narrative of strength and purpose. Each figure represents the individual energy formed with wire during a live session with a model.
Hoffman, a Zen Buddhist, considers Eve to be one of one her spiritual ancestors. Several of the watercolors in the exhibit are from the series, “Kaddish” which Hoffman painted in response to the eleven Jews killed in the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
In creating art, we transcend tragedy, we integrate the parts of ourselves that we have kept hidden, and we have the opportunity to tell new stories and discover new and shared identities. When women empower women, they can heal the world.
Hoffman is the curator of an annual outdoor sculpture exhibit at Old Frog Pond Farm. A contributor to WBUR’s Cognoscenti, she writes a blog, Apples, Art, and Spirit. Her memoir, The Artist and the Orchard, will be published by Loom Press in the fall of 2021. A Zen Buddhist, her dharma name, Shinji, means Truth in the Soil.