Collection: Artist: R. Melinda Hoffman

R. MELINDA HOFFMAN ARTIST BIO AND STATEMENT
Drawing on her decades of experience as a fashion designer, art director, and visual manager, R. Melinda Hoffman crafts works that explore the intersection of identity, memory, and material culture. Using mixed media, leather, and modern anthropological artifacts sourced from Resourceful, Santa Fe, Capital Scrap, and ReStore, Hoffman creates sculptural adornments, symbolic amulets, and imaginative accoutrements that highlight the stories of obsolete, discarded objects. Her off-the-grid home between Cerrillos and Madrid, NM, doubles as her studio, where she creates works that straddle the line between functional fashion and statement accessories.

Hoffman is an analog devotee who strives to live off the land, keeping things minimal and manageable. During a recent decluttering, Hoffman rediscovered a box filled with idea journals and sketches from her days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inside these dusty volumes were the origins of Hoffman’s studio practice: community collaboration, art as armor, and an ever-evolving question of what adornments produced with analog tools might look like in an increasingly digital world. Unlike modern manufacturing, Hoffman’s design and production process is entirely analog.