Linda Hoffman

During junior year abroad in college, I trained in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq School of Mime, Masks, and Theater. Upon graduating as a Fine Arts major at Bryn Mawr College, a Watson traveling Fellowship took me to Kyoto, Japan for two years of training in the Noh Theater, where I absorbed the Japanese traditional aesthetics of simplicity, beauty, and the patina of age. Upon returning to the states, I began an extensive exploration of narrative sculpture using reclaimed tools, fibers, wood, stone, and found objects with poetry influenced by the Zen poets I was introduced to in Japan. Some years later, I entered into Zen Buddhist training and continue to practice at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, New York.

When I was seven years old, I remember taking a small kitchen pot outdoors, sitting among grass and weeds, and pulling up the small seed stalks of plantain. I would hold the stem and run my fingers down each one, watching the seeds tumble into the pot. I did this over and over until the pot was filled. Running my fingers through the accumulation of seeds, I felt something both alive and peaceful, complete and whole. I knew I was creating something beautiful and yet not something I could name. I continue to do this today—always creating something with my hands and heart.

I didn’t know I was an artist, only that I was curious about things most people overlooked. In high school I took a painting class with a fantastic teacher, and couldn’t stop painting. Experimenting with line, shape, and color, I filled canvas after canvas, and knew I wanted to be an artist. In college, the art training was traditional—we worked from a model—both in sculpture and painting, while at the same time, I became part of a mime troupe performing throughout the Philadelphia area. The mime led me to train in Japan, where I met the father of my three children.

Today I find inspiration at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, MA. I moved here in 2001 with my three children, leaving a marriage of twenty years. There was an abandoned apple orchard on the land and I decided to bring it back and do it organically. The orchard became the first pick-your-own organic apple orchard in Massachusetts, and this month, we celebrate our 19^th annual outdoor sculpture exhibit along with fruit picking. As the farm continues to grow, I find inspiration from the land and the community of writers, farmers, artists, and spiritual seekers it attracts.

As an example, this fall for the outdoor exhibit at our farm, I installed a series of ten sculptures representing a Zen Buddhist teaching, The Oxherding Series. It’s a series first created using ink paintings and poems by a Chinese Zen Buddhist master for his monks to see the spiritual path they were following. I made the sculptures in wax, had them cast into bronze, and mounted them to stones placed on a wooded knoll. By creating paths among the tree trunks and plantings, along with other stones placed to represent mountains, visitors can walk as if they are leaving home and embarking on a journey. The Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery wrote new poems to go with this installation.