Artist’s Statement    Interview

    Between 1998 and 2004 Beatrice Hoffman worked on a series of head shapes, seventeen in total. They evolved in an explorative process from naturalistic to distorted heads, and further transforming and fracturing into multiple heads – of either man and woman, or woman and child. Hoffman thereby connects to a tradition reaching both far back into antiquity, widely across the globe and into the modernist and cubist 20th century. She both feeds off these roots, yet outgrows them to find her very own original synthesis, and her message that crosses borders between spirituality, psychology and mythology.

    The head invites empathy on the side of the audience – as a human race, we are primed to do so. The experience of looking at the sculpted head resembles looking into a distorted mirror. Hoffman considers the form of the head the perfect vehicle to explore issues relating to the human soul, and what we believe to lie behind the facial features, and further inside the walls of the brain – perception, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, that together form our identity. Using the language of sculpture, Hoffman seeks to find a simile between a state of mind, and the form of a head.

    She simplified the form to achieve clear lines and smooth taut surfaces delineated by sharp ridges, whilst playing with the scale and proportion of specific facial features. Multiple heads are fused together with curves, arches and caves. They are distorted and stylised; hard angles are juxtaposed with more rounded surfaces. She describes complex relationships between part-heads: they can be interpreted as an internal, psychological reality. At the same time, they can be read as the concrete joining of two individuals.

    She uses the three dimensional medium to its utmost potential, offering sometimes conflicting views from different angles, intentionally challenging the symmetry of the face to uncover a surprising trans-formation: In one head, the features “explode out” of the face; in another head, the face curls around to touch its own other side, creating a great vessel in the process.    

In most heads, there is a creative tension between frontal view – the individual facial features – and back view – an abstract shape, either spherical, or angled, that denotes our common humanity or the Jungian shared unconscious. In a similar fashion, front view and profile sometimes contradict and defy expectation. In this way, the sculptures draw you in, entice you to walk round them, and experience their changing three-dimensional physicality.

    She exploits the possibilities offered by the medium of sculpture and builds up a tension: outline and surface against volume, skin against bone or ridge, soft against hard, concave against convex. 

    In creating the multiple heads, she addresses both divisions and merging between two identities; the challenge is to make something abnormal, even impossible, look natural and convincing. Some of the divisions are clear-cut, following the symmetry line through the middle of the face, emphasising the polarity of male and female for instance. Others are embedded into a shared skin that inflates and deflates not following the laws of anatomy, but those of an alternative physical reality, that matches the internal, invisible and fluid movements of feelings.

    Hoffman’s sculpted heads enable the viewer to find the way into an interior dimension, that is often withheld, its existence doubted, and sometimes feared because of its unknown and unknowable nature. Beyond the surface of “familiar faces”, the viewer explores a mythological depth which reveals ambiguously rich images, where identity is not clear cut, obvious, and objective, but becomes a felt experience.