JEANNE HOFFMAN | Gardening Fragments

A Portable Paradise

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

- Roger Robinson

Jeanne Hoffman describes her practice as akin to gardening with fragments, a working metaphor she lighted on when preparing for a show during the 2020 lockdown. Fittingly titled To make a landscape fit indoors, this body of work saw her return to collage as a starting point in her creative process, a medium that has travelled with her throughout her career, but which at that point in time made particular practical sense due to the worldwide restrictions on working space, movement and access to materials.

Collage, however, is far more expansive in definition than the cutting, rearranging and juxtaposing of tangible images and textures that catch the eye. In Hoffman’s work, it constitutes an assemblage of landscapes – geographical, political, and psychological – a framing of disparate contexts, a teasing together of diverse terrains. To adopt another gardening analogy, it is “borrowing scenery” in the manner of shakkei, the Japanese horticultural discipline of framing distant, external landmarks within a garden’s immediate design.

In Hoffman’s process, her first, literal collages are germinal; they catalyse, and evolve through, the painting process, where meaning is made through a series of intuitive gestures and responses to these various references. As such, “gardening with fragments” refers not just to concept but to process; it is not merely abstract but action, as Sean O’Toole asserts:

Gardening here refers to a habit, one that involves sustained attention to multiple, discrete parts while holding an overall design in mind. Gardening is not simply ideational; it is physical and intuitive, demanding constant movement, adjustment and return. This approximates Hoffman’s studio practice. She works on multiple paintings simultaneously, establishing a rhythm across the studio as she alternates between action and response, problem and solution.[1]

This is meaning made in movement, in creating space between up-close, personal preoccupation and a stepping back, a wider angle. She likens this process to a dance, and an artwork thus to a “diagram of moves”, where the limits of the canvas frame both interior and exterior landscapes, looking both inward and outside. As O’Toole expands, this phrase “diagram of moves”:

…describes how external thought – be it history, philosophy, current events – enters the studio. Ideas are not illustrated; rather, they are metabolised through a recurrent alternation between action and response. Back and forth. Repeatedly. [1]

As collage evolves through painting in a continuous reciprocity of gardening fragments, so too does it continue between individual paintings across space and time. New works revisit old collages, unearthing unfamiliar etymologies upon a second or third reading; paintings borrow scenery from one another (scenery sometimes layers-deep, hidden in an artwork’s earlier iterations); fragments of former exhibitions are recollected for the future, invoking memories new and old.

These are thus creative, fertile spaces; the canvas frame has captured the scenery for just a moment. The frame could be a window, looking inside or outward – we see suggestions of blue skies, floriferous wanderings, architectural structures. Or the frame could suggest a wall, delineating an aerial view of landscape and invoking the Persian origin of the word “paradise”, pairi-daêzã literally meaning “walled garden”.

Gardens are constantly changing and ultimately heedless of borders, and in fragmentation is dissemination, connection, continuing. Sanctuary is located in movement.

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 Footnotes

[1] O’Toole, S. (2026). A Diagram of Precarious Moves. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Jeanne Hoffman | Temporary Shelters. Everard Read.

 To request the exhibition catalogue, please contact gallery@everard.co.za