ocean is part of an ongoing project started in 2016. Elsa Hoffman bolts sheets of new steel onto a seawall at the down east NC coast during low tide. Exposed to the daily tidal shifts, the panels are submerged then revealed by tidal waters: the water, salt and air transforms the industrial surface; the slow transformation of the metal becomes a clock, an organic landscape and map or graph of time passing in all its beauty and inevitable decay. 

Hoffman sees her role in this project as a curator or choreographer. Setting a stage and parameters, using a net to capture a period of time, to facilitate the visual translation of time and its effect on the physical world. 

There is a lot of sentimentality embedded in this project. The human reaction to want to preserve all things precious (people in your life, specific moments of time, objects, places) while the cognizant, simultaneous knowledge of the inevitable ephemeral quality of our existence. This project feels like a practice in embracing precious moments and also ritualistically letting them go.