Louise Hopkins
Until December 20; doggerfisher

Exactly 50 years ago Robert Rauschenberg took a Willem de Kooning drawing and erased it, leaving nothing but traces of ink and crayon behind. He took something which had been made and he actively unmade it, adding to its meaning while at the same time negating it.

Erasure has made a come-back. Maps are blacked out, musical notes are obscured and comic book texts are effaced in Louise Hopkins’ solo show at doggerfisher. We are left with groups of isolated dots representing nameless towns; blank staves with only the occasional rest or repeat; and comic strips where empty speech-bubbles in empty frames untell us a story.

Hopkins has met with a good deal of success since her Tramway show of 1996, which is reflected in the prices for her drawings, ranging from £1100 to £4800. This recent work, the result of a Creative Scotland award, falls loosely into two categories: those whose former content has been removed, and those whose hidden content is revealed.

In the maps, musical scores and comics, the signifiers don’t signify anything anymore. The visual syntax is there but the meaning has been removed, leaving only the ghosts of notes and words behind. The second group of works is far more subtle, but conveys a potent message.

Blank paper – lined, grid, and foolscap – is partially deleted and intricately, but inadequately, repainted by hand. In Lines, Holes and Dots, a second margin is painted in half way over the page, with punch holes where you wouldn’t expect to see them. This foregrounds the fact that the paper is not blank at all – the framework is there, unnoticed, before our words and pictures are even formed, a way of warning us that our open minds are full of lurking preconceptions.

Hopkins – well-known for her maps – delicately sidesteps the one-trick pony trap with a number of delightful flashes of inspiration, such as Orange Dot, where splashes of paint are lifted from the page with pencilled-in shadows; and Wood, two painted photographs where branches and twigs sprout freely from knots in sanded floorboards. The images are hung in comfortable clusters, with the same subtlety and lightness of touch as the works themselves.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 23.11.03