Artist’s Statement    Interview

Kay Wolf: Your sculptures of heads describe psychological and spiritual states of minds:

Beatrice Hoffman: My series of heads revolve around the psychological themes of human identity, gender and relationships. In this context I  am drawn to sculpting in clay, stone or plaster as the most perfect medium to express feelings through form So many emotional states find a metaphor in the physical nature and demands of sculpture; notions like gravity, balance, cavities, protuberances, directions,  angles, surfaces, push and pull, have their emotional equivalent, and can all be exploited to describe feelings, that are by their nature invisible. So spiritual issues become tangible and solid and manifest into this world. Sculpture is particularly suited to describes a journey or process, a movement through time and place,  as one walks around it and witnesses the transformation. This 360 degree circumventing also allows for contradictions or multiple realities to be included, held together and resolved.

Kay: Your sculpture tell stories. For instance the double heads, with their theme of relationship

Beatrice: With "Sun and Moon", relationship is not yet developed. Instead of man and woman, there is the internal balance within each one of us between male and female. The image derives from fairy tales and myths that tell of celestial constellations. In distinction to most European archetypes, the man on the left is the moon and he looks rather ascetic, while the sun-woman on the right dominates with her round forms. I wanted to use these contrasts, and take the challenge to unite them in one form.

Kay: In "Man and Woman", Man and Woman both participate equally in the whole. Yet, if you look closely, you will remark that she is turning away.

Beatrice: Henry Moore inspired me with his topic of relationship -both formally, and emotionally. To describe the whole, he emphasises its parts, and their relationships towards each other. With "Man and Woman", the original egg has split in two halves, and one half is pushing itself over the other - there is a kind of ambivalence. The woman wants to go, and she can’t, or doesn’t - not yet. Movement is frozen, caught in a permanent state of flux. With "Nurturing” , there is as similar movement of the right head away from the left.  I thought of a human bird chick (on the left), that greedily demands food of its mother - pecking kissing, feeding. The space between the two is cramped. Within their shared closeness it shows need, dependency on the one hand, and the longing to find freedom from the responsibility of care on the other.

Kay: With the sizes of the heads being quite similar, there is ambivalence - are they mother and child, or lovers reproducing that first intense love affair at the beginning of life?

Beatrice: With "Mother and Child", I enlarged the abstract, concave space, that both binds them together and holds them apart. This time, the left , larger head inclines towards the other, rather than pulling away. Her hair doubles up as her protective space, in which she cradles the child. This sculpture also incorporates tinges of the adult man/woman relationship - depending on one's angle of perception. The woman nurtures and protects the man as the son he has once been – and for that, he worships her, raises her to become a saint - the Madonna of Christian history.

Kay: And whether this symbiosis is a mainly happy one, depends on one's early experiences. There are widely differing perspectives in that, and they are all contained in one sculpture. This explains the various, and individual ways of responding to one single work of art.

Beatrice: With sculpture, you make one fleeting moment, expression, or mood eternal. There might be parallels with the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the "Bardo" - the soul is caught in one expression, one emotional experience, for as long as it is identified with it. Sculpture freezes this moment for us to perceive it better – see it, value it, understand it – and then possibly outgrow it, and let it pass.

Sun and Moon

Nurturing

Man and Woman

Mother and Child 2