Louise Hopkins - Work

Work

Louise Hopkins is known for rarely making work on blank surfaces, choosing instead to start with a material that is pre-existing, and usually pre-printed, either with specific imagery or more generic graphic information. From this she develops painted or drawn marks as a way of engaging and transforming the surface.

Found surfaces that Hopkins works onto include furnishing fabric, maps, sheet music, graph paper,pages from history books and, lately, from commercial catalogues.

"The artist has spoken of her interest in working on supports which contain information, often an image, and in turning that image into a painting by repainting and hence remaking it."

"Louise Hopkins’s world is in an endless state of flux, becoming and adjustment. Meaning for her is never something to be merely established-through research, for example, or contemplation-but rather galvanised, sparked into a state of pulsing iteration and reiteration…In an indicative work, Untitled (011), 1998, she once crumpled a piece of white paper, the kind generally used to write or type or scribble or photocopy on. She acted not in anger or frustration but to make the paper more interesting, yet not less itself. To the same end, she then used a fine pencil to draw thin parallel marks delineating the faint shadows cast by the creases. The paper’s once latent complexity was unleashed. Its pristine (artless) past remained a presence beneath the surface. Through a set of effects, both accidental and intended the blank sheet had become defined, articulated through hard-edged incident; it also continued to carry the dynamic tension of its violent collapse."