Glasgow-based artist Louise Hopkins is most known for her detailed, laboured repainting of old furnishing fabrics. Founded on the interstices between semiotics and formalism, Hopkins appropriates found images and everyday mass-produced fabrics into her work. Using them as a material support, she refashions their surface, remarking and re-inscribing them with gestural, expressive forms that offer a stark opposition to the printed text, line or diagram. Her add-ons are distinct. Often hand-painted, playful and simply executed; they contrast with the anonymous printed matter that is easily recognizable. As particular kinds of signifiers, however modified, they form a dialectical relationship with the personal mark of the artist. Her starting point, then, is the stuff of the real world; already formed and circulating and having its own identity and context. The images prior, often collective meaning, is distilled through an aesthetic intervention on the pictorial surface that is both formal and indexical. Within each painting the weight between content and form is deliberately measured. Upon completion the work offers multiple readings. Possible thematic concerns are present – political, social, geographical. But this also corresponds with a commitment to the medium of painting. Indeed, as the Fruitmarket Galley’s Fiona Bradley noted, her aim appears to be the turning of found images into paintings (2005). Unraveling this particular aspect of her practice has been the crux of our conversations and I want to take it as the point of departure for this paper.

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This paper was presented as part of UCL's Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2016-17.This seminar paper formed the foundation for an article submitted to the Journal of Visual Studies (2020) which is currently in press.