Barbara Hocker was born in South Norwalk, CT. Her earliest years were spent living between a Long Island Sound beach and a saltwater marsh where life was organized by the tides. Water was elemental to everything, from the unique smell of the marsh at low tide to the floods that happened whenever storms came with winds from the northeast. Always interested in nature, it is probably no wonder that water has been her primary subject matter for more than 15 years.

Barbara’s love of books also arose in her childhood when her mother and both her older sisters worked at the public library.  Books were enjoyed in her family both as stories to be read and as important objects with a history of their own. Barbara especially cherished a few old books – poetry collections and a third-grade reader - that belonged to her father and were published in the 1920s. Books as objects, artifacts, and art is a love that has never left her. 

Ever since an epiphany in a difficult summer of 1999, Barbara has focused on tranquility, ephemerality, and meditation in her artwork. A few years later she discovered Tai Chi and has been practicing ever since. She brings the sensibilities of Tai Chi and Qigong into her artwork and artist books. While Barbara has used book forms since college, a Creation of New Work grant from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation in 2013 allowed her time to focus on a collection of about a dozen artist books and led to books and book structures being a major focus of her work going forward. She explores many different book forms and is currently especially interested in two historic Chinese bindings. Whirlwind and Dragon Scale bindings were short lived structures resulting from the introduction of paginated codex books from the West into China. Both were attempts to add multiple pages to the scroll form that had been used in China for centuries. Barbara experiments with these forms to create books and modifies them to create hanging scrolls.

Barbara has exhibited her work extensively, including solo shows in Hartford, New Haven, Newport, and Boston. Her work is in institutional and private collections, including the University of Colorado Library’s Rare and Distinctive Book Collection and the permanent collections of The Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital system in Manhattan, Westchester, and New Jersey. Awards include Fellowships/Grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the Greater Hartford Arts Council, the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, and Artist Resource Trust of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. She holds a degree in Fibers from Syracuse University’s College of Visual & Performing Arts and attended Cranbrook Academy of Arts. Barbara lives in Bolton, CT and her studio is in Hartford, CT.