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.