One of Linda Hoffman’s sculptures at Old Frog Pond Farm. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Old Frog Pond Farm, which Linda Hoffman calls home, has provided inspiration for her sculptures and a setting for this summer’s outdoor sculpture exhibit sponsored by For Arts’ Sake. It’s easy to see how an artist could draw inspiration from the sinewy trees in the orchard, tidy lawns, a roaring fall, and the placid pond. In a recent interview Hoffman spoke of how she arrived at this special place: “Everything was bare and brown. But still, there was something that just drew me.”

As she placed sculpture all over her property during an outdoor sculpture exhibit this summer, Hoffman used her wiles and nature to squeeze the most of the experience. She explained how perfect it felt to have Eleonora Lecei’s Searching surprise visitors from the trees. How suitable it was for Alicia Dwyer’s Dryad Grove to stare back at viewers from tree trunks. How appropriate, and simple, for Bill Turville’s Eco Warrior, a mask of woodland transformation, to greet guests toward the end of the exhibit, perhaps to reflect back the change we had undergone. Hoffman’s own The Arrival was among the sculptures greeting visitors as they crossed a footbridge: a bleached branch steps in for a true axle. A triumphant figure celebrates. Two rusted wheels stand precariously joined by a fossil, man’s remnants, nature’s remnants.

Hoffman said that a formative experience for her was a period of study in Japan. She was fascinated by Noh theater, an art form dating back to the 12th century. This traditional theater is quite different from our own: the actors practice alone, and there is just one performance. Never again will that combination of circumstances and people come together. Hoffman stressed that the actor is the medium for a text, a play, something ancient and venerable. She demonstrated the stylized motion of weeping in Noh theater, a beautiful sequence of motions performed with “the purest expression” one can muster. In all areas of her life Linda seems intent on reproducing the perfection of that weeping motion, in transmitting something bigger than herself to the world.

Hoffman has a deep appreciation for what nature has wrought. Her studio is filled with bizarre, unusual, contorted tree trunks, branches, and wooden creations. Hoffman pointed out unusual shapes, abnormalities in the wood, suggesting that some whimsical hand had moved through the woods long before she arrived on the scene. She has several examples of what she calls “tree harps.” This is a tree with an anomaly that has forced it to grow around an invasive fungus. She said that after the introduction of such a foreign body the tree will create a barrier around the invader and continue to grow around it, past it, in spite of its destructive potential.

At the pond’s edge is a different kind of appreciation of the natural world. Hoffman’s rock series sculptures with bronze figures remind us of how tiny we really are. One figure pushes a rock, engaged in the classic Sisyphean struggle. Another sits with its legs dangling over the edge of a rock, like a mountain climber taking a well-deserved break. Yet another moves fluidly up the face of the rock. A hiker and outdoor enthusiast, Hoffman said that she tries to imagine the small rocks as vast crags, the little creases as crevasses, and to put herself in the place of a rock climber.

Hoffman spoke of how her organic orchard is taking over her life and yet she welcomes this change as an educational opportunity and an amazing outlet for her artistic spirit. She said of the minutiae of graphics for T-shirts and signage for her pick-your-own farm, as well as creating sculpture, organizing big events, writing poetry—“it all kind of flows out of me.”