Jeanne Hoffman reflects on the ideas that shape Temporary Shelters, her presentation for the SOLO section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026. Expanding on her notion of artworks as “temporary shelters for thoughts,” Hoffman considers painting as a process of attentive listening — to fragments, materials, language, and the spaces that exist between what can be felt and what can be articulated. She discusses her collage-based method, the role of repetition and transformation in her practice, and how each painting becomes a “diagram of moves,” a careful negotiation between intuition and intention through which histories, ideas, and emotional landscapes are continuously reassembled.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
Often revealing the spaces between things, your work treats paintings, drawings, and ceramic objects as “temporary shelters for thoughts.” In the context of the SOLO section’s theme, “Echoes of Humanity,” how do you perceive the act of listening to these in-between spaces, and how does the act of listening manifest in your artistic practice?
Listening, in-between-ness, shelter: these are rare acts and threatened, shrinking spaces these days. I find that they gravitate towards each other in a poetic sense, across art forms and between people, and certainly generate a “roominess” that draws me in as an artist, that I hope extends to the viewer.
Language and listening — in an expansive sense — have always been central to my practice. Poems, for example, can be understood as temporary shelters too; language making contact with what, paradoxically, cannot be said. And I know poetry is often meant to be spoken, but I always feel like something is lost the minute it becomes audible. There is something different and subtle when heard with your mind’s “ear.”
I see this space between what is felt and what can be articulated about feeling as a kind of intermezzo, a resting place for the imagination, for free association. There is something generous in that.
Drawing a parallel between travelling across a landscape and the trajectory of a graphic mark across a blank page, your work explores themes of movement and transformation. How do you interpret these “echoes” in your practice, and what do you hope they communicate to the audience about the emotional and socio-cultural dimensions of place?
The process of making work is an enactment of transformation. Every work is a diagram of moves: a series of reactions to the world. The “world” here takes the form of collected fragments that are assembled into collages, which act as starting points.
I use only four or five references for a new body of work. I use the same starting point over and over again in an effort to prove to myself that history is never predetermined. Things can and could have gone many ways, and certainly not the way the loudest voices would like to claim. History is a multiplicity of points of view – of continual change, shifting and possibilities of becoming – not one grand narrative. This is where listening, carefully and with considered attention, has become a vital act, even a kind of agency.
Your multidisciplinary approach incorporates various materials and mediums. In your practice, how do you engage with materials as a form of listening?
I think about listening beyond it being merely audible. It can be a multi-sensory listening, like how your body “listens” (or could if you really tuned in), simply the act of paying attention through whatever sense is relevant in the particular moment.
When I was a student, a mentor once told me she didn’t need to travel much anymore, that she travelled through material, by working in unfamiliar mediums or processes. At the time, when all I wanted to do was travel, it seemed radical and contrary. And yet, the idea has stayed with me. I think she was saying one has as much to gain by staying in place and paying attention. Simone Weil’s observation, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” comes to mind. I hope that between the various visual, verbal, and spatial languages, something generous emerges from the work and continues through conversation, whether verbal (articulated) or not.
In place of a sound piece, Hoffman offered viewers earplugs—an invitation to experience the work through a moment of intentional silence.
Hoffman is represented by Everard Read.