Of Threads, Collage and the Bigger Picture

Of Threads, Collage and the Bigger Picture

I often think in images and metaphors. They help me understand processes before I can fully put them into words. Sometimes one of these images appears unexpectedly and stays with me.

In July, I visited the Maritime Museum in Flensburg, where I found myself absorbed in a presentation about rope-making in pre-industrial times.

What an extraordinary amount of work it took to make a single strong rope!

Individual fibres were first twisted into threads. These threads were stretched out over long distances, brought together, and twisted again. Something thin and almost fragile became strong through the interaction of many separate strands.

That image has stayed with me ever since.

Increasingly, I see my own artistic practice in a similar way.

The many threads of an artistic practice

Over the years, I have picked up and followed many different threads: painting and drawing, landscape and abstraction, colour and line, observation and intuitive gesture.

And, again and again, collage.

Some of these strands occupy me intensely for long periods. Others almost disappear, only to surface again years later. For a long time, I simply saw this as the diversity of my interests. Today, I am becoming more interested in how these different strands are connected.

I am interested in noticing which threads keep returning, and discovering how they gradually begin to twist around one another.

Leonardo da Vinci popped up in my my. Alongside his Madonnas, he was studying anatomy, designing flying machines, investigating water systems and developing technical constructions. What a great rope he was building!

There is something deeply human in this desire to connect things: to follow different fascinations and find meaning in their difference. Everything is connected.

Collage: a thread reaching far back

Collage has been part of my life since I was young.

I was fascinated early on by the act of cutting, separating, moving and reassembling. Perhaps because collage offers a particular kind of freedom: nothing has to be in the right place from the beginning.

An element can move. Something can disappear and reappear somewhere else. Planes overlap, gaps open up, relationships change.

For many years, collage was also a way of awakening my creative instincts.

Whenever painting became too intentional, or I found myself trapped inside a particular idea of what an image should become, working with found shapes, pieces of paper and fragments brought movement back into my thinking.

Over time, it has become much more than that.

Collage as a way of composing

Today, my thinking through collage is increasingly structural, almost architectural.

I am interested in what happens when planes meet. How they interrupt or extend one another. How an empty space can create tension. How two separate elements can suddenly become connected through a line, an overlap, or a shift in position.

Dynamic spatial relationships begin to emerge.

I am less interested in creating the illusion of conventional perspective than in asking how space itself can be felt on a flat surface.

This way of thinking has long since entered my painting as well.

Even when there is not a single piece of paper in a painting, its internal structure may have emerged from a collage sensibility.

From the Page into Space

This is why I am particularly delighted that several of my works were selected for the exhibition “Vom Blatt zum Raum – Papier im Dialog” at the Städtische Galerie Stapflehus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

For me, this invitation is more than an opportunity to show works on paper. It confirms something that has become increasingly clear to me over the past few years:

Collage is not a sideline in my practice.

It is part of its foundation.

At a time when I am deeply engaged with gestural painting, landscape, abstraction, and the physical immediacy of painting, I find it fascinating to recognize how strongly this structural way of thinking continues to run underneath it all.

Freedom and structure are not opposites for me. Gesture sets something in motion. Collage asks how the parts can live together.

And somewhere between the two, the painting emerges.

Exhibition

Vom Blatt zum Raum – Papier im Dialog
Städtische Galerie Stapflehus
Weil am Rhein, Germany
through October 25, 2026

Open Studio in Kandern

On November 27 and 28, 2026, I will open my studio and gallery in Kandern.

After an intense year of painting, I am looking forward to bringing together a larger selection of new works from 2026 and showing many of them for the first time.

For me, it will also be a chance to see the different threads side by side: new paintings, works on paper, and developments that have only begun to reveal themselves over the course of this year.

There will be a few surprises as well.

More information about the Open Studio will follow soon.

Open Studio – Insa Hoffmann
November 27 & 28, 2026
Studio & Gallery, Kandern, Germany