What a Net Makes: A Visit With Barbara Hobot

It seems either odd or extraordinary that I should be reading Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore at the same time that I begin talking to Barbara Hobot about her artistic practice. In the 2017 novel, an artist is freed from formalism and convinced to paint the essence of a thing–“the premonition of impending movement”–by an Idea borrowing a physical form. This Idea whispers in the artist’s ear, transforming his artistic practice into embodied feeling instead of pure realism. In conversation with Hobot, I am reminded of Murakami’s protagonist. She tells me that her work guides itself into realization; it becomes what it wants to be. She lets the idea find its own form.

We’re having a conversation about mediums and labels. What kind of artist is she? How does she define her practice? She is everything and nothing. While content reoccurs throughout her practice, she tries her hand at mediums as they crystallize out of a tangle of thoughts and interests.

The net has realized itself in many forms throughout Hobot’s practice, first appearing in her 2010 work exploring archetypal tools (rocks, sticks, rope), and later taking hold of her imagination during the artist’s graduate studies at Western University, followed by a trip to Chile in 2016, which prompted her research on fog-catching nets used to harvest water. At Hobot’s recent solo exhibition at Toronto’s Olga Korper Gallery, “The Fugitive’s Forge”, the net continues to be at the core of her work.

The net as alchemical, the result of Newton’s recipe for a purple copper iron alloy with a net-like pattern written in code through the myth of Vulcan discovering Mars and Venus, ensnaring them in their state of betrayal. The net as the negative space from Chilean fog-catching nets overlaid in collages of a footed glass bowl and in CNC-cut aluminum digital prints of the Andes and Carpathian Mountains. The net as a drawing series dating back to 2014 in which the artist first traces and contours a physical net. The net embodied in the gesture of pinning two mountain ranges together rendered through digital silk prints.

When I see her new collages on fabric and aluminum exhibited with her net transfer drawings, I recall a diptych from Hobot’s 2014 show “The Sliced Belly of the Berm” at London’s DNA Artspace: a drawing of a net paired with a photograph of sunlight penetrating a striated patterned curtain. Two depictions of movement and weaving. Gestures captured by the artist that are already there, taken for granted, proximal and separate. A net: a tool, a cultural practice, and a curtain: a room, an intimate and everyday space.

An urgency to present this kind of interdependence might position Hobot as an environmentalist, but she isn’t that declarative; her hand is suggestive. The recurrence of nets as tools does situate much of her work in the space shared by history and nature, but in conversation, not in protest. Celestial Dew Trap (2018), for instance, is a photograph printed on paper of a fog net in Peña Blanca, Chile held up by the dynamic power of the sky in the form of a bright blue magnet clinging to a sheet of  steel. The net and the sky, working together, the two bearing their own dynamic, passive power. The piece is large and immersive. It feels as though the rest of a sublime terrain could rise up around you, both natural and handmade.

Hobot’s work creates a sense of being present in another place while standing right where you are. In the stark white of the gallery, even in the digitized white of a screen, she leads the viewer through a maze of coalescing propositions. In “The Fugitive’s Forge” Pinned Landscape No. 3 (2022) together with Hobot’s Andean-Carpathian Alloy series feature collaged mountainscapes as digital prints on fabric and aluminum. The Tatra Mountains are part of Hobot’s ancestral homeland, and the Andes are the root of her net and copper-mining research. Both ranges were formed through volcanic activity and are mineral-rich. Hobot’s connection to place and her urge to present the dichotomy between survivance and materialism is a prompt to merge the Andes and Carpathian mountain ranges. In linking these mountains the artist posits a feeling of being close to a distant place, of exploitation and how simultaneously near and far it is. The subject of exploitation is clearly represented throughout the artist’s recent works and has the effect of prompting consideration of one’s individual relationship with the land we live on and other distant lands we rely on.

Hobot places mountains in conversation with another tool–the container–in new pieces Alchemist’s Drinking Cup 1 through 11 (2022), collaging an image of the back of the copper support for a painting (Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan by Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael) with the image of a footed bowl made to look like semi-precious Chalcedony (both available in high-res through the Getty and visited by the artist on a recent research trip yielding a multitude of serendipitous connections). These works weave together elemental timelines: toxic alchemical recipes and the pursuit of sacred knowledge held against resource-depleting copper mining for the sake of consumptive technology, draining ever more precious water sources. The drinking cups are depicted in states of transformation, as if a chemical process is coming to life. Each collage presents a changed state, and progressively they are overlaid with patterns from fog-catching nets reflecting the CNC cut nets in the Andean-Carpathian Alloy works. The presence of alchemy and our obsession with toxic experimentation is further developed in eponymously named collages of alembic vessels on backgrounds of interconnected minerals: Chalcanthite, a poison ore seeping through copper veins; Carpathite, a rare mineral with a ring-like molecular structure; and Cinnabar, a pure form of mercury historically ground into a powder for aesthetic and hallucinogenic use. This newer focus on alchemy seems a natural progression in her study of tools and their creation.

On the surface, these works are disparate, but together they create a complex web of histories and technologies. When I asked the artist what she reads or listens to throughout her research process, she answers that her interests are provoked by connections she happens upon, sparking up a new but interrelated direction. In reference to her recent alchemical thread she sourced “Newton’s Dark Secrets”, a NOVA documentary on historian Bill Newman’s recreation of Newton’s net-like purple alloy as inspiration, and among the studio pictures she shared I spot a print of The Doctor of Fools (Theodor de Bry, included in Jacques Lagniet, “Recueil des plus illustres proverbes, divises en trois livres,” Paris, 1657-63) an engraving poking fun at alchemists as dark artists and pretenders, taped on her shelf. Hobot’s experimental approach to form offers a kind of visual magical realism. Do Ideas whisper in her ear, offering her freedom to identify a particular feeling and realize its form? I’m captivated by witnessing the breadth of her practice and how I continue to see it looping back over itself as an immaterial net. I’m not quite sure where I’m going, but it feels right and, in the end, it all comes together in a rush of relatedness.

Tarin Dehod was born on unceded Mi’kmaq and Wabanaki Confederacy land originally known as Epekwitk and now lives and works on Treaty 6 and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Since 2014, Tarin has served as the Executive Director of AKA, working to understand the role of the artist-run centre in joint ownership with communities, as a space that is created and given meaning through the actions of its users.

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue