Barbara Hocker
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. I want my work to be intimate, purposely unsettled and imperfect, invoking association, resonance, sensuousness and metaphor to create poetic images. I use alternative lens optics and digital post-capture processes to find unexpected results. My artwork inhabits an expanded field between photography, printmaking, bookbinding, and digital media. It is nature-based, intimate, purposely unsettled and imperfect. There is a flow and play between reality, realism, and abstraction expressing my direct experience of nature, beauty, and life. I am interested in the abstraction of nature that is possible with digital media and in expressing the atmosphere or “feeling” of a place more than capturing a technically exact photograph. After the photography is done, I embody the digital images in a tactile physicality. I do this by printing on novel substrates like silk, cotton, & rice papers and by working with fiber techniques like weaving, plaiting and bookbinding.
