Camel Blue is the Loneliest Colour
First published in the catalogue for Sorrel Hofmann’s solo show, &Friends, at the AVA in Cape Town.
Sorrel Hofmann, Untitled (Position I), 2017, watercolour on paper | Credit: Sorrel Hofmann
The artist Sorrel Hoffman and I began our conversation sitting at her kitchen table. A glass of water for me, a new box of cigarettes for her – Camel Blue, bought in bulk and kept on the microwave. “You don’t mind if I smoke?” she asked when we first sat down.
That morning, a Monday, we spoke for almost two hours and all twenty cigarettes. Hofmann had asked me to write a catalogue essay for her upcoming show &Friends at the AVA, so I had come to her apartment, which doubles as a home and studio, to discuss her preoccupations and process. I sat with my back to the window, and looked towards the paintings, prints and objects hung and placed about the room. My eyes skipped over the scene, caught by a bold mark here, a seed pod there, a note on the floor left where it had fallen, a piece of bark balanced on the window sill. Hofmann’s mind skipped too, pausing on topics only briefly, diverting and returning to them, following threads of connection that eluded me.
“Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” She asked, more than once. “Yes,” I replied, uncertain, carried along not by what she was saying, but by the infinite enthusiasm and curiosity with which she said it. Our conversation touched on psychology and ecology, politics and womanhood, Spinoza and Manet. It felt as though Hofmann spoke of everything in general and nothing in particular.
Hofmann’s work is marked more by her tireless questioning than by a single conceptual preoccupation. She reads widely across many disciplines, and her research and discoveries filter through into her work, notating and documenting the historical moment and its discontents. She is not a conceptual artist but rather a thinking artist.
Above all, Hofmann told me, her work is concerned with knowledge production, its inadequacies and its oversights. This concern speaks to her dissatisfaction with cultural norms, the control of academia, and the authority of pervading ways of thinking about and being in the world. “What is the position of the human being?” She asked. I didn’t answer; she didn’t expect me to. A cigarette butt trailed smoke in the glass ashtray between us.
Written in pastel across a painting in her studio were the lines yadda yadda yadda and blih blah bluh. I could see it from where I sat. All this talking, the lines suggested, amounts to nothing. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
It was only later, driving home, that I was able to appreciate the slippery nature of Hofmann’s work, which is at once all-encompassing yet non-prescriptive. Where nothing is quite as it appears – and where a cigar is never just a cigar – the artist’s work is suggestive and generous, inviting many possible readings. Pushing against grand narratives, Hofmann answers dogmatism with a studied evasiveness.
By avoiding any one reading, as I have since come to understand, Hofmann’s work rebels against explanation and pushes back against the didactic and its boundaries. Her work provides the anti-venom to a hegemonic story about a world that is biased and half-blind.
Hofmann reached for another cigarette. Behind her, a note taped to the wall read:
Freud asks: What do women want?
Zizek asks: What does Europe want?
Below it more notes. What happens when it is folded back on itself, one said. A continuous dialogue between gesture and thought, said another. Then, across the room and above the light switch, Freud’s frothy vaginas.
Much in the same way Hofmann’s mind jumps from subject to subject, her work appears largely frenetic, a collision of intentions and materials, thinking made visible. Her mark-making is vigorous, even urgent, and the resulting works often feel uncontained. They spill out, off the canvas, past the frame.
“In certain works,” her website offers, “the edge – the limit between interior and exterior – ceases to enclose and confine, becoming instead an open space of mutability.”
Looking at her studio and hearing her describe her creative process, Hofmann struck me as a profoundly productive artist. She works in many registers of image-making, sometimes representational, more often symbolic, and always tending towards the abstract. Her visual language translates fluently across many mediums, from paintings to sculpture, printmaking and large-scale installations. Hofmann works variously with pastels, watercolours, oil paint, rabbit-skin glue, graphite, and charcoal to produce richly dense surfaces layered one upon the other. She often also includes found objects in her works, particularly those from the natural world – branches, seeds, shells, bark. In Hofmann’s studio, in Hoffman’s mind, everything is a potential material.
Yet amid the visual noise of the studio were more meditative works, too. A row of paper works hung above the studio window shared only a single calligraphic mark that carried across them, appearing as an obscure ideograph only the artist can read. Works like these – the quiet works, the empty works – illustrate Hoffman’s economy of means, the assertion of her mark-making, and the stillness of a simple gesture described in pigment.
Where her mark-making is fervent, her palette is restrained, with natural tones — a seam of gold, Indian ink, and muted pastels. “Blue is the loneliest colour,” Hofmann told me, “and ochre. The colours of the desert.” She paused to light another cigarette. Then, “People say there are no marks in the desert. They’re wrong, of course. There are marks; it’s just a question of looking for them.”
In tacit agreement, a handwritten note read: And so I went there and there are traces that are left, even when the wind blows.
I was reminded of a passage from Andrew Lamprecht’s catalogue essay for Hofmann’s solo exhibition at UCT’s Irma Stern Museum last year:
“Sorrel recounted to me a profound moment of discovery that happened when she went into the desert alone. Fearing she might lose her way in the dunes and amongst the shifting sands, she placed small markers of twigs and then bits of her cigarette box as she traversed the landscape, a sort of makeshift riff on Ariadne’s thread.”
The materiality of Hofmann’s practice provokes questions of permanence and the ephemeral, solidity and insubstantiality. The natural elements in her work will no doubt begin to decay; the unprimed paper with gestural marks made in oil paint will slowly decompose. Nearly all of her work will change, however slowly, following the organic processes that notate the passing of time.
“My practice is grounded in material instability where disintegration signals the provisional as a central concern,” Hofmann writes on her website. “Here the provisional includes transience, the fragility of memory and the significance of the incidental.”
By asking how long the mark will last, how long the work will remain intact, Hofmann explores the notion of forever-ness, which she approaches with a Zen-like understanding of temporality and change. The artist often returns to a single phrase in both her work and her writing: We will be what we are until we are no more.
Yet, of course, traces of what we were will still remain, as they do even in the desert, pieces of a Camel Blue box in the shifting sands of the Sahara.
