Louise Hopkins: Freedom of Information
Until December 11; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Nine years ago, with a solo show at the Tramway, Louise Hopkins’ career hit the big time. Now, with a major show at the Fruitmarket Gallery surveying the artist’s career so far, her reputation is cemented. There remains no doubt that Louise Hopkins is an artist of international importance, consistently unpeeling our deepest preconceptions with an unwavering hand.

The English-born, Glasgow-based artist is almost an anachronism in today’s art world. She works quietly and patiently in her studio. Her cultural reference points are universally ingrained, and timeless. Her paintings and drawings are not site-specific; they are entirely self-contained. They are made to last, and left to speak for themselves.

Hopkins rarely paints on a blank canvas. The world isn’t a blank canvas, and neither are our minds. Every time we look at, or try to understand something, a complex web of suppositions and assumptions comes into play. We can only ever read one or two words at a time, and never the whole page. So it is with maps, sheet music, and comic strips. Hopkins takes these universal languages and infiltrates them, turning our assumptions inside out and forcing us to start comprehending the world all over again.

The very word “comprehend” means to seize. Any military person will tell you that the power to map out territory gives you the power to seize it. This applies politically as well as militarily, if you consider the Euro-centrism of such supposedly neutral terms as the Middle East.

In Europe And The Middle East, Hopkins reworks a map made in 1943 for the British Council. The sea is painted over in a careful facsimile of the land, resulting in a vast unwatery landmass which is quite unrecognisable. All the towns and countries remain, but their shapes and boundaries are lost. Peering close, it’s possible to identify the areas where Hopkins has intervened; fictional towns are suggested with grey squiggles instead of clearly printed names.

This is no Gulliver’s Travels map of fantastical lands and made-up names. It is a wake-up call to us, for thinking we know the world just because we’re familiar with its standard representation. We might be able to discern, close-up, Hopkins’ deceit, but she still successfully obstructs our usual mental short-cuts. Without whole swathes of blue to define the shapes in our peripheral vision, we’re lost in uncharted territory.

Hopkins doesn’t stop at subverting the marks we make on paper; she also questions the authority of the paper itself. In a series of delicate works shown two years ago at doggerfisher, the artist unhinges the lines and punch holes on foolscap and graph paper. Scratching away the pale blue grids, with all their supposed authority and scientific infallibility, Hopkins redraws them with an imperfect human hand. It is a perfect metaphor for the limits of science, which is as prone to human subjectivity as any other field of knowledge.

Hopkins has done the same to sheet-music, redrawing the staves of love songs and removing the notes and words. All that is left are the rests and repeats, like breaths and scratchy whispers.
In World Events (4), a history book gets the Hopkins treatment; its two pages are obfuscated in a tightly-drawn mesh. None of the words are deleted, but they are successfully incorporated into an illegible mass. History is a question of taking facts and moulding them into a story; in Hopkins’ version, it’s impossible to separate the plain facts from the dense, destructive pattern which surrounds them.

The earliest works in the exhibition – the career-making Aurora series of 1996 – are painted on the back of flowery furnishing fabric. Of all the works in the show, these are the most classically beautiful, their subversion buried under a lyrical surface.

The pale blue ghosts of flowers, showing through from the reverse of the fabric, share space with their painted doubles. Hopkins has repainted the flowers directly on top of the originals, in mellow tones of brown. A print of flowers becomes a painting of flowers, without a real flower anywhere in sight.

Although she left furnishing fabric behind her for a few years, Hopkins soon returned to it to create much more violent interventions. The artist decimated a French design of prancing Rococo aristocrats with her quietly lethal brush marks. The charcoal-coloured figures are smothered in a writhing mass of tiny black strokes borrowed directly from the fabric itself. Just like the history book, Hopkins makes it impossible for us to read the image, simply by filling up the empty space around it.

The artist has returned to furnishing fabric yet again with her most recent work, Relief (739). Here she has infiltrated the space between leaves and berries, sculpting it into billowing curves. A previously consistent repeating pattern has been restructured into a whole new composition of dark and light.

There is a stark difference between this latest painting and the early fabric works of 1996. While the Aurora series made gentle gestures of dissent, the new painting is a creepingly violent interruption of the status quo. While Hopkins has always been quietly subversive, the new painting is positively punk.

The meaning of these furnishing fabric works is not easy to tease out. Restructuring a map is a heavily loaded act and perhaps the most obvious way of questioning our perspective on the world. The restructuring of decorative leaves and berries, on the other hand, is formally fascinating, but quite enigmatic.

It is, in the end, this intelligent mix of revelation and enigma which makes Hopkins so special. Each picture demands time and intense study, unfolding its wisdom slowly. A few reveal their secrets willingly, but most promise a life-time of contemplation. At the centre of it all is a delicate balance of intuition and intent, which promises to keep us guessing for a long time to come.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 16.10.05