ARTIST STATEMENT

Alongside my primarily figurative artistic practice, I have also always painted the plants and landscapes of Appalachia. These forests and flowers are in my blood. When I was a kid, my mother was part of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society. She would take me along on their walks, and I became the unofficial photographer of the group. I was enchanted with the new digital cameras and more than willing to get down on my knees in the mud to capture the plump genitalia-like pink lady slipper flower or the mysterious digestive juices within the hairy walls of a carnivorous pitcher plant. Spotting delicate native wildflowers on walks through the woods and knowing their names is a thrill that has never left me. Even more exciting was when I began to learn that you could eat many of them: violets and dandelions could be plucked and snacked on as I strolled; the backyard became a delightful spicy salad of herbs and greens. In the kitchen, my family developed new seasonal traditions: black locust blossoms fried in a light batter and served with powdered sugar, bracken fern fiddleheads blanched and cooked with ginger and spicy Sichuan peppercorns, wild oyster mushrooms tender and savory with garlic and soy sauce.  I was delighted to discover that my forest was full of delicious food that only cost me the pleasant and rejuvenating time spent in it. Then, I began to learn that there was even more magic than a beautiful sight and a delicious meal in these plants: they were medicine too.  In my mid-twenties I contracted Lyme’s disease and had a long and difficult battle to regain my health. Jennifer Tucker, depicted here as the subject of my painting The Herbalist, and other natural healers helped me to recover my strength, alongside doctors of modern medicine. I painted this portrait of Jennifer as homage to that experience, trying to capture her wisdom, generosity, and healing spirit. She has introduced me to this deeper magic of plants, and I will be forever grateful to her for it. The wildflowers that I chose to paint alongside this portrait are all favorite native wildflowers of mine that all also have traditional medicinal uses in various Native cultures.  

ARTIST STATEMENT

Hunter/Gatherer

For the past decade, I’ve followed friends and neighbors into the woods, onto bays or frozen lakes, and across fields thick with eye-level grasses as they pursue wild food.

At some point recently, putting such ingredients on the dinner table became popular again, trendy, even, with big features splashed across the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines.

My series Hunter/Gatherer documents the myriad ways people have always pursued such wild foods, from ducks and deer to wild herbs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, fish, and mushrooms.

What these foragers will tell you is that beyond the nutrition or healing properties of the herbs, or the complex taste of wild game, it’s mainly a connection to the land, woods and waters that they most pursue and nurture over the course of these activities.

View a subset of images from this series at erikhoffner.com/gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As an amateur mycologist I spend a lot time foraging for mushrooms. This requires deep observation and attentiveness to the landscape, and it has changed the way I interact with nature. Studying mushrooms is a great way to shift one’s focus, to slow down, pay attention, and be present. Many people aren’t aware that John Cage was also a renowned mycologist. I see a direct relationship between Cage’s ideas of “silence” and his interest in mushrooms. Both offer a formal opportunity to observe the often ignored but deeply meaningful happenings of the world around us. Through the process of photogrammetry, I “scanned” polypore (conk) fungi found in the forests of Colorado, and created 3D models of their fruit bodies. These models are customized to fit speakers, and 3D printed. This series consists of two mushroom-inspired sound sculptures: All That The Rain Promises plays a binaural field recording of an early morning rain in the central Adirondacks. The title takes its name from a mushroom identification guide (All That the Rain Promises and More by David Aurora), and references the feelings of excitement, anticipation and hope that a rainfall produces in mushroom hunters. Leave It or Double It plays a recording of my voice reading the Latin names of 24 mushroom species over the sounds of sculptor Christopher Duffy learning to play his custom, hand blown glass Armonica. This piece is an homage to John Cage who once won $5 million Lire on the Italian game show Lascia o raddoppia by reciting, in alphabetical order, from memory, this list of white-spored agarics described in Studies of American Fungi by George Francis Atkinson (published in 1900). 

ARTIST STATEMENT

The work in this series begins with creating mushroom spore prints. Spores are tiny, reproductive cells that allow fungus to replicate and grow; the prints are generally used to help identify the genus of a specimen. On paper, they manifest as dusty replicas of the original forms. Because the initial images I gather are impermanent, I cut arrange them into collages, before photographing them. Born of actual living organisms, the collages point to larger patterns and systems in the natural world, at once suggesting the furious division of cells, and the eternal expanse of deep space. I am equally compelled by the biology, and by the lyrical mysteries of nature intermingling in the ghostly topography of these impressions.