Créer avec la nature

Créer avec la Nature is a book by international transdisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck. Written in French and published by Editions Ulmer in 2023, this hard-cover book features 140 illustrations, including 63 full-page artworks and photographs, all printed with vegetable inks in Italy. Créer avec la Nature delves into the artist's memories growing up in rural Alsace close to the land and her grandparents, the foundations of her work, and the philosophies that nurture her practice. Across seven chapters, each inspired by a body of work part of Johanna's practice, the readers and viewers are invited to explore natural farming, permaculture, kindness, multiculturalism, and to slow down. This book is at once soothing and initiates profound reflection. The artist associates suspended moments and memories of small, simple pleasures found in gardening with essential conversations as she does in her visual works. In Créer avec la Nature, Johanna discusses compassion and food, growing up in France and discriminations beside the roots of The Gardening Drawing Club and the loving transnationalism that shapes her continuously as she shares pieces of her life in France, England, India and Japan.