Barbara Hocker has three decades of experience as an artist, exhibiting extensively in New England, including the Lyman Allen Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum, Artspace New Haven, and Real Art Ways. Barbara has work in the collection of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers in New York and New Jersey. She has received fellowships/grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Greater Hartford Arts Council, The Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation, and Berkshire Taconic Foundation’s Artist Resource Trust. She studied at Syracuse University and Cranbrook Academy of Art. She maintains a studio in the Arbor Arts Center in Hartford, CT.
Barbara’s work inhabits the expanded field between photography, printmaking, and digital media. Digital photos, monotypes, watercolor, and encaustic become works on paper, panels, handmade books, and installations. Inspired by her interest in Wabi-Sabi, she fuses a material sensibility with a love of nature to create works that capture moments and details that are intimate, subtle, and beautiful, as well as layered, fleeting, and imperfect.
Featured Collection
Artist Statement
My life’s vocation is being an ambassador for the natural world through my art. The depth and extent of the crises facing Nature are overwhelming. There is so much to do it can be difficult to start, but the Earth needs our love and care. I express my experience of the beauty of nature in my work to inspire that attention, love, and connection in viewers. Let us start where we are.
I start by capturing images with various digital cameras and lenses. I shoot skies, waterfalls, streams, rivers, lakes, and the sea. I look to find the feeling of the moment and place and often write haiku to accompany images or pieces.
I print the photographs, pull abstract monotypes, and paint watercolors on thin sheets of rice paper, infusing them with encaustic wax. Papers are cut into strips and woven together then mounted onto panels. The wax makes the paper translucent and blends the images together, creating a sense of depth and movement.
I use the same images and haiku to explore various book formats and bookbinding techniques ranging from hardcover accordion fold books to book sculptures. Seriality, repetition, and the encoding of time are all present in the building up of the book stitch by stitch and page by page.
Trained as a Fiber Artist, I am attuned to how many small actions can build up to larger effects. In the same way, our seemingly small personal actions can combine to begin to heal us and the Earth.
Work in Progress
