Ocean is part of an ongoing project Elsa Hoffman started in 2016. Hoffman bolt sheets of new steel onto a seawall at the North Carolina coast. The panels are submerged then revealed by tidal waters: the water, salt and air transforms the industrial surface; the metal becomes a clock, a landscape and map or graph of time passing in all its beauty and inevitable decay.
Hoffman see’s her role in this project as a curator or choreographer; setting a stage and parameters to capture the visual translation of a period of time. There is a sentimental human reaction to want to preserve all things precious (people in your life, moments of time, objects, places) which exists with tension with the ephemeral nature of our existence. This project is a practice in embracing precious moments and also ritualistically letting them go.
ocean panel (12/7/23- 8/17/24 Marshallberg, NC)
ocean panel installed on sea wall
ocean panel 1. 48"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2020
ocean panel 2. 48"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2020
ocean panel 3. 48"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2020
ocean panel 4. 48"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2020
ocean panels at My Room, 2020
ocean panel detail
you were there. 96"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2018 Installed for the Bull Meets the Bayou show at The Carrack, Durham, NC
you were there. 96"x48", steel, ocean water, air, time, 2018
process
a couple more months
Phil's house
“Sliver of a moon and stars in sky. Winds sweeping in from sea. Tide is slowly creeping back in after a thoroughly far low tide. Audio recorder is mapping sounds of this landscape, of these moments passing. Significant to this specific time period […] days ending and beginning…While I sleep tonight the water will rise, tide will come in, the metal will be submerged. Evening moving/mooring. Will leave one panel up, to be taken down later. I will check on it in a month and see how far gone…Every 14 seconds lighthouse beams this direction. After all of these years still signally steadiness, stability, direction, grounding point. […] The textures of the moon shadow of wind water; lights all else is quiet but the wind won’t stop and the sea is rising and we are quietly sitting here. Phil is snoring now. We will wake at dawn to check the metal."
-Elsa Hoffman, ocean journal entry, April 30, 2017.