Savina Hopkins: NEWS

DECEMBER 2018
Collins Place Summer Salon
Exhibition Launch & Prize Announcements : Friday 7th December, 6 - 8pm

Collins Place Gallery, 45 Collins St Melbourne
Exhibition Dates : 1st December - 31st January (closed for Christmas from 21st Dec - 7th Jan)

One Of Us Is Only - Savina Hopkins

AUGUST 2018
Paper
Opening : Friday 24th August

Neon Parlour, 791 High St, Thornbury
Exhibition dates : 22nd - 2nd September
Opening hours : Wed - Fri 11am - 6pm, Sat - Sun 11am - 5pm

Artists: Luisa Cavalieri, Simon Deere, Irene Ferguson, Savina Hopkins, Seb Ingram, Shannon Mary, Ted Mckinlay, Zennie McLoughlin, Abbey Rich, James Riches, Alexandra Thornton, Lin Tobias, Dylan Vella, Travis Vella, Matthew Watts

True Verdict - Savina Hopkins

JUNE 2017
Nillumbik Prize 2017
Opening 1st June 6.30 - 8.30 pm
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Barn Gallery, Montsalvat, 7 Hillcrest Ave, Eltham
Exhibition dates: 1st June - 30th July

Finalists: Penelope Aitken, Liliana Barbieri, Kellie Joy Barnes, Peter Ben, Janette Bird, Matt Blackwood, Maria Colaidis, Samuel Condon, Stephanie Davies, Magdalena Dmowska, Ella Dunn, Helen Edwards, Annita Furey, Silvi Glattauer, Claudia Gleave, Lloyd Godman, Ev Hales, Siri Hayes, Savina Hopkins, Paul Kalemba, Denise Keele-Bedford, Sean Kennedy, Tracey Lamb, Jo Lane, Elyss McCleary, Anna McDermott, Louise Meuwissen, Gabriella Moxey, Terrianne Murray, Gay O’Connor, Irene Pagram, Matthew Quick, Gwen Scott, Jodi Stewart, Linda Swinfield, Camilla Tadich, Ronak Taher, Erin Tappe, Liz Walker, Michelle Williams

JANUARY 2017

L-R: Ester, Grace - Savina Hopkins

AUGUST 2016

Fake stump, real tree - S Hopkins, 2015

The new issue of Materiality with the theme FAKE is out now. I have some photographs in it, like the one above. This wonderful journal has gone digital and is now free. It can be viewed (and also printed) in 9 easy to download sections. Get yours here!

JUNE 2016

Cover art and illustrations I created for issue #223 of Overland, the excellent Australian literary journal.

MAY 2016

Current Location - S Hopkins, 2016

Wild Cards & Fugitives
Curated by Dominique Dunstan - a group exhibition using defunct library catalogue cards.
To be opened by Kate Torney, CEO State Library Victoria
Opening: Thursday 15th May, 3:30 - 4:30
Venue: Joyce McGrath Gallery, State Library Victoria

JANUARY 2016

Headway - S Hopkins, 2013

Contact - S Hopkins, 2007

I'm taking part in a group exhibition '12 Inches' : An exhibition of album covers for records real or imagined. Getting the chance to show some of my older collages, which are exactly the size of an LP record cover.
Opening: Monday 11th Jan (ends 16th Jan)
Venue: The Snug, 447 High St, Northcote

DECEMBER 2015

Rubicon ARI are having a Mad-Minute fundraiser and I've donated the above artwork to the cause.

Opening: Wednesday 22th December, 6 - 9pm
Venue: Rubicon ARI, Level 1/309 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

AUGUST 2015

Home@735 Gallery presents
19.08.15
Somchai Charoen | Sam Cutcher | Genevieve Felix Reynolds | Savina Hopkins

Opening: Wednesday 19th August, 6 - 8pm
Venue: Home@735, 735 Bourke Street, Redfern, N.S.W
Exhibition dates: 19th Aug - 13th Sep

Gallery hours: Thurs 2 – 5pm, Sat & Sun 2 – 5pm

Countess - S Hopkins, 2015

Opening night, photography by Steve Mclaren

JUNE 2015

Persona Obscura

Opening: Wednesday 17th June, 6 - 8pm

Exhibition dates: 18th June - 4th July

Venue: Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

Gallery hours: Tues - Sat, 12 - 6 pm

L-R: Eileen & Maude, Dear Aimee (Miss Constance Worth), Clementine

Persona Obscura: Disrupted Portraits

(Catalogue essay by Laura Skerlj)

Savina Hopkins currently works from a studio in a decommissioned hospital wing in Melbourne. The site is quiet, with circle-shaped gardens of roses, lavender and balmy herbs for meditation and mourning. Eggshell blue corridors house congregations of discarded patient-recliners; medical fixtures still protrude from the walls. This unusual studio seems the perfect space for Hopkins to have realised her current body of work: a series of delicately wrought collages, where the faces of antique postcard portraits are removed using a medical scalpel before being replaced with flanks of skin-coloured Band-Aid.

Two years ago, Hopkins began using this process to make portraits of her family members. The first in her Band-Aid series was a study of the artist’s father who was unwell in hospital at the time—the intense focus required to make his image encouraged her to reflect deeply upon their connection, what it meant to be human (and therefore, damaged), and the transpiring discomfort sometimes felt living in one’s own skin. This and other studies in the series, presented a unique, and sometimes fraught, connection with the “sitter”: by using the faces of those she knew so well, the nuances of their intimate relationships became implicit in the matrix of her process—looking, considering, cutting, masking, suffocating, healing.

In contrast, the people featured in Hopkins’ current exhibition, Persona Obscura, are unknown to the artist. Her primary material—silver gelatin postcard portraits that date back to 1910-1930—were sourced online, gifted to the artist by friends and colleagues, or scrounged for at second-hand markets. On the verso of some portraits are brief letters that contain meagre, if any, autobiographical clues. Although this new distance between artist and subject might seem limiting, on the contrary, it opens up the formal potentials and conflicting attributes present within Hopkins’ Band-Aid works. While there is something destructive about cutting skin, particularly a face, from an image, Hopkins’ practical sensitivity, in which every subject is precisely tended, reflects her desire to recreate them as best she can using this unromantic and faux-somatic material.

Aesthetically, Hopkins’ work has a particular vintage. Like the walls in her hospice studio, old-world hues butt against the tiny plastic panels that now compose the subjects’ faces. Moody details within the original photographs—frosting, jewels, couture and flowers—have been carefully included through delicate cutting, or highlighted using paint. Damaged surface areas of the photograph have also been retouched. Their scale is considerably smaller than the previous family portraits, the Band-Aid panels applied with meticulous care. Even in their presentation, other papers and fabrics from this era, collaged around the photographs, expand their nostalgic quality. Having completed postgraduate studies in scientific illustration, as well as maintaining parallel jobs in museums, archives and library environments, there is an undoubtable “collector’s instinct” present across Hopkins’ oeuvre. However, there seems less of a desire to present artefacts than to use sophisticated learnt techniques to psychologise old images via new processes.

Just as Victorian post-mortem death portraits were orchestrated to present the deceased as still living, Hopkins’ work conjures a similar psychological disruption. As the artist explains, there is a definite disquiet associated with suffocation, loss and injury that occurs when the flesh-like material is applied all over the subject’s face: “Using Band-Aids allows me to explore a complex psychological terrain, as there is a particular emotional charge in this unconventional material that I find thoroughly engaging.” As trauma, by nature, requires continual repression to exist, this insistence upon covering, or exchanging, the truth-telling face with something face-like is in keeping: the bandaged images become traumatic, almost literally, as the word “trauma” is identified in Greek as a psychic “injury”.

From this, there is a poetic disjuncture within the works’ formal considerations that recalls French literary theorist Roland Barthes’ distinction between a photograph’s “studium” and “punctum”. In his iconic, Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes articulated the former as that which occurs in the image: the photographer’s intentions, the general gist of the picture. These attributes are the elements—faces; gestures; settings—that compose the work. The latter “punctum” is less agreeable. It is defined as an aspect within a photograph that disturbs: “[a] sting, speck, cut, little hole… a cast of the dice… an accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Although the disruption within Hopkins’ work is not oblique, there remains a slippery shift between the outer photographic scene and the refined yet plastic inner collage that conjures this allusive, and recalcitrant, quality.

Darkness aside, there is also humour in a portrait made using a material that mends playground wounds and minor kitchen casualties. When expecting a face yet finding a chimera, the viewer is jostled between their expectations and reality. This method of working suffused much Surrealist and Dadaist collage of the 20^th century, as artists displaced the ordinary to create abnormal visions. However, in this contemporary work, the angular sections of Band-Aid take on a pixel-like quality against the original image’s hazy romance. A parallax to the present infinitude of “selfies”, sitters in Hopkins’ original source-images patiently held their position for a single portrait. As one avatar replaces another, Hopkins’ masked subjects chuckle at our enduring vanity.

In turn, this sympathetic process—in which antique portraits have been collected, contemplated, and quite literally de-faced—is sentimental, traumatic and humorous. The void once occupied by the sitter’s most essential feature is rearticulated using various carefully selected Band-Aids. The result is an abstraction of character that is as unsettling as it is well-formed; just as a painter might apply a specific tone, glaze or brush stroke to fully-realise the essential features of their sitter, Hopkins’ sensitivity toward her materials—both Band-Aid and photograph—reveals a perplexing transition between the real and the uncanny.

Laura Skerlj is a Melbourne-based artist and writer. www.lauraskerlj.com

Opening night at Seventh Gallery

APRIL 2015

This year I've been busy in the hospital studio, working with my band-aid postcards portraits. Here's a sneak preview of the kind of work I'll be exhibiting in Melbourne in mid June....

Raffaellina (detail) - S Hopkins, 2015

DEC 2014

My new series of band-aid portraits got a plug on The Art Life, New Work Friday. Jolly good!

NOV 2014

My photographs of cemetery votive boxes, seen through their scratched perspex doors, published in the Melbourne journal Materiality #4: Surface.

OCT 2014

Recent work from my hospital room studio at St Vincent's, made from band-aids & photographic studio portrait postcards.

SEP 2014

Photographs (with some photoshop trickery) I took for Habitual Criminal, a play by Carolyn Bock, a Shift Theatre production, showing at La Mama in October.

Another poster design/spot of photoshopping for Melbourne band Baron von Choice, set to tackle "the difficult follow-up gig" at Bella Union this month.

AUG 2014

A commissioned illustration for an article on the intertwining identities of therapist and mother.

JULY 2014

Helena Cedran has written a feature on my band-aid portraits, published on the Artrend section of 20 Minutos, a leading Spanish newspaper. You can read it here - if you can read Spanish!

JUNE 2014

HOWL

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPS IN OUR HUMAN LIVES

Savina Hopkins, Plastic Pig, watercolour on paper, 2014

Kylie Blackley, Jill Bolitho, Gonzalo Ceballos, Charlie Chamma, Alana Di Giacomo, Shaun Duggan, Elizabeth Hickey, Savina Hopkins, Colleen Jones, Cheralyn Lim, Renuka Rajiv

Brunswick Arts Space, 2a Little Breese St, Brunswick

Opening: Friday June 13th, 6 - 8 pm

Exhibition Dates: 14th - 29th June

Gallery hours: 2pm - 6pm Thurs & Fri, 12pm - 5pm Sat & Sun

MAY 2014

I designed this poster for Melbourne band Baron von Choice, who are performing at Bella Union next month.

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This month marks the beginning of my year long art residency at St Vincent's Hospital. I'm rather enamoured with the studio space and very much looking forward to making new work here.

APR 2014

Pinknantucket Press have launched their latest issue of Materiality, this one with contributors responding to the theme 'Precious'. I have an article / series of photographs in it focusing on hard rubbish called 'Trash as Treasure'. Get yours here! Subjects covered in this edition include Japanese lacquer, love letters, the lost thylacine, illuminated manuscripts, saffron, luthiery, gems, rubbish and gold, plus cover art by Gracia & Louise.

[This issue was reviewed on Arts Hub by Sonia Nair on July 15th]

Photograph - Savina Hopkins

FEB 2014

Brunswick Arts Space present 'Entry 2014', their 9th contemporary art prize / fundraiser. I have a piece in it, come along for the art and festivities.

Brunswick Art Space, 2a Little Breese St, Brunswick

Opening: Friday 7th Feb, 6 - 9 pm

Exhibition dates: 8th - 16th Feb

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I'm very happy to have been awarded an artist residency at St Vincent's Hospital - Caritas Christi Hospice, commencing in May this year.

JAN 2014

I collaborated with Renuka Rajiv on 2 artworks for this group exhibition.

'I've got you under my skin'

COLLABORATING WITH THE OTHER

L: Androgynous Bosch (mixed media on paper) R: Pitted History (mixed media on paper)
Savina Hopkins & Renuka Rajiv, 2014

Opening: 16 Jan, 6.30pm

Exhibition Dates: 16th Jan - 2 Feb

Venue: Blak Dot Gallery, 430 Lygon St, East Brunswick, Vic

Gallery hours: Thurs - Sunday, 10am - 5pm

DEC 2013

I have a work in the Belle Arti Prize, all details below.

5th Annual

Belle Arti Prize

35cm x 35cm, $5000 National Acquisitive Prize

Opening: Wednesday 11th December, 6 - 8 pm

Exhibition dates: 12 December - 25 January

Venue: Chapman & Bailey Gallery, 350 Johnstone St, Abbotsford, Vic

Gallery Hours: 10am - 5.30 pm Monday - Friday, 11am - 5pm Saturday

This year's judges are Juan Ford (Artist), Melissa Loughnan (Utopian Slumps) and Max Delany (NGV)

NOV 2013

Close Quarters

Inlet / Outlet (collage on paper)

Opening: Wednesday 13th November, 6 - 9 pm

Exhibition dates:13th - 30th November
Venue: Rubicon ARI, Level 1/309 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat, 12- 6pm

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Arts Hub have published this review of Close Quarters by Marguerite Brown.

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Art Almanac has selected my show, Close Quarters, for the Feature Exhibitions section of their November issue. Click here to view it online, or flick to page 53 of the actual, printed issue.

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My band-aid family portraits find their spiritual home... on the cover of Psychotherapy in Australia journal. Out now!

OCT 2013

Preparations are in full swing for my upcoming show, Close Quarters, at Rubicon ARI next month.

And yes, I made the paper weight too, using recycled leather from the spine of an old book, lead shot and waxed cotton thread. Collage fragments are firmly adhered to the substrate!

SEP 2013

Photo credit - Alice Cannon

Pinknantucket Press are the publishers of Materiality, a journal about the material world. My artwork features on the cover of Issue 2: Time. Read about this issue here. To purchase a copy click here.

Launch : Friday September 20th, 5.30pm at Sticky Institute

AUG 2013

Slow Watch Karen Gray and Savina Hopkins

Curated by Gina Kalabishis

Exhibition Opening: Tuesday 27 August, 6-8pm

Venue: Gallery Ranfurlie, Korowa Anglican Girls’ School, 10-16 Ranfurlie Crescent, Glen Iris

Viewing Dates: Wednesday 28 – Monday 2 September, 1-4pm (excluding weekends)

Gallery Ranfurlie presents Slow Watch, the work of Melbourne artists Karen Gray and Savina Hopkins. Despite different approaches to art making, Gray and Hopkins both place symbolic value on the subject. Whether contemplating interpersonal relationships or keepsakes of personal significance, their work speaks of a preoccupation with the foundations of memory and the workings of the psyche.

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Fiddler Beetle (Eupoecila australasiae)
watercolour on paper

Jewel Beetle (Castiarina media)
watercolour on paper

The Aikenhead Cente for Medical Discovery (ACMD) is holding it's inaugural Acquisitive Art Prize at St Vincent's Gallery. I have two scientific illustrations of beetles in this exhibition, painted from specimens studied under a microscope at Melbourne Museum. All details below.

Opening: Monday 19th August, 5pm - 7pm

Venue: St Vincent's Art Gallery, Ground floor, Daly Wing, 35 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy

MC: Steve Ellen (RRR and 774)

Dates: 1st - 28th August

Gallery hours: 9am - 5pm, Mon - Fri

JULY 2013

Sarah Gubby has written an artist profile on me, published on Heritage Rescue, Collections Conservation.

'Spotlight on Savina Hopkins' by S. Gubby

MAY 2013

I have ploughed my family archives to create a series of portraits using adhesive dressings (‘band-aids’) as a primary medium. The band-aids approximate flesh tones and are applied to describe the form and contours of the body. Via the symbolic and metaphorical connotations band-aids can evoke, I aim to charge each portrait with psychological weight, exploring and amplifying interpersonal dynamics.

MARCH 2013

I have been working on a new series of work for a group portrait show, 'Limits of Likeness' at Rubicon ARI in May. Here is a sneak preview of work in progress....

FEBRUARY 2013

Marguerite Brown has written a review of my Dymo silhouette series on her blog Visual Pursuits. Click on the link below...

'The Existential Ponderings of Savina Hopkins' - M. Brown
"...this series is quite revealing in its humour, albeit the kind of black humour which is particularly enjoyable. Like getting drunk and jovial at a wake despite being grief-stricken, it’s a bit of a fuck you to the dark unknowables of life."

JANUARY 2013

I am exhibiting a new series of works in a group show at Red Gallery as part of Midsumma.

Yarra Arts - Energy from Stillness
Artists: Matto Lucas, Emma Buckland, Alexander Edwards, Tama Favell, Hillary Green, Jacqueline Gwynne, Savina Hopkins, Cath Johnston, Sol Mann, Renuka Rajiv and Mel Simpson.

Opening: 6 - 8 pm, Wednesday January 16th
Red Gallery, 157 St Georges Rd, Fitzroy
Exhibition runs: 16th Jan - 2nd Feb 2013
Gallery hours: Wed - Sat, 11am - 5pm

Subsumed (detail)

vinyl embossing tape on board (2012)

Vinyl ‘Dymo’ embossing tape is typically used for labelling one’s possessions. In a similar way, our thoughts and stories help define a person’s identity. By using the labelling tape to form head silhouettes I am exploring the ways we employ spoken words and unspoken thoughts to judge and measure ourselves and others.

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Penny Webb has written a review of my Dymo work in The Age newspaper (Wed Jan 20th, 2013, pg 13).

'Small Works Get Up Close and Personal for a Big Impact' - P. Webb (excerpt below)
Suitably reminded by Croce that metaphors enable us to absorb information and make sense of experience, pay a visit, too, to Hopkins' show across town. You are what you think. Savina Hopkins puts this idea to the test, with exquisite works incorporating statements such as ''False dichotomies pay my rent'' and ''Hell is a sparrow trapped in Ikea''.
Exceptionally, the former incorporates additional found graphics (from a bank note bearing a line drawing of a church and therefore beautifully illustrating the dichotomy of God and Mammon). The latter, which is a fabulous combination of pink, red, green and black strips, wittily delineates a bearded jaw with the use of forward slashes on black.

The words, punctuation marks and symbols, which always appear as white, were embossed in strips of coloured self-adhesive vinyl tape by an old hand-held Dymo label printer, then cut, line by line, to a predetermined outline. Assembled, they create profiles of people that are successfully individualised, despite the clunky process.

See the clever delineation of the man's hat by a change of green in ''I won't forget no matter how long it takes''. Except for the pink, the coloured tapes are vintage. Only the most hard-hearted would think wood-grain vinyl is not something to treasure.

These silhouettes have been stuck down onto manila card that has been cut from old-fashioned folders, some printed with intended office use, and these connotations become part of the image.

Hopkins has an ear for a telling phrase, and as you stand close to these works in their splendid timber frames, ideas run in your head as they do in those of her subjects.

- Penny Webb

Photography - Erica Lauthier
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DECEMBER 2012

I have an artwork in the Belle Arti 2012 Prize Exhibition at Chapman & Bailey.
Opening: 6 - 8 pm, Wednesday 12th December
Chapman and Bailey Gallery, 350 Johnston St, Abbotsford
Judges: Sally Smart and Rosslynd Piggot
Exhibition runs: 12th Dec 2012 - 26th Jan 2013

Dad

bandaids, paper, linen, pencil and acrylic on linen (2012)

*UPDATE - Thrilled to have been awarded a 'Highly Commended' for this work!

NOVEMBER 2012

My work has been shortlisted for the PB Towage People's Choice Award, showing at the Atrium Gallery, World Trade Centre, Docklands. Opening: Thurs 8th November, 6- 8 pm (enter via Siddeley St).

OCTOBER 2012

A recent editorial illustration for 'The Place for Judgement in Postmodern Clinical Practice'

SEPTEMBER 2012

Good news! I've been selected as a finalist in the Mission to Seafarers ANL Art Prize. The theme of the award is 'The relationship between humanity and the sea'. I have used discarded paper fragments from Australian Naval Department files of the 1930's and 40's to construct this collage.
Exhibition: 5th - 31st October, Mission to Seafarers Victoria, 717 Flinders St, Docklands
Hours: 12 - 7pm, Wed - Sun

Past Current

collage on paper (2012)

AUGUST 2012

I've been working on some new collages. In an attempt to get rid of stuff, I threw Gombrich's 'Story of Art' in the recycling, then reconsidered...I couldn't resist ripping it up, then doing a little collage, with some old advertising brochures. I feel a little series coming on...

My latest blog post features many nice dice. Click here for more!

JULY 2012

This image was commissioned for the article 'The Four Faces of Depression', to be published in the August issue of Psychotherapy in Australia.

JUNE 2012

I created this image in response to the song Spiderinajar by the band IAMLOVEPROOF, for their inaugural zine.

APRIL 2012

I contributed images to Something Fine, a collaborative project based on encounters with first love.

MARCH 2012

I have a photographic piece in a show, 'Visions of Self and Others' at the Joyce McGrath Gallery at the State Library of Victoria.
Opening: 3.30pm, Thursday 29th March, State Library of Victoria
The exhibition will be officially opened by Sue Hamilton, Acting CEO and State Librarian.

Oh me oh my oh

Digital print (2012)

50cm x 50cm

This is a self-portrait carved into the trunk of a spotted gum tree. I documented the portrait over several seasons, watching it transform. As the shallow wound healed, it successively browned, cracked, and the bark shed. The line work of the original image thickened as gradually the image was both absorbed and erased by the continual growth of the tree. My interest in the nature of aging, the formation and disintegration of identity and memory via this process, and ultimately, my relationship with death all inform this work.

FEBRUARY 2012

One of my latest editorial illustrations for the February issue of 'Psychotherpy in Australia'. The article by Michael Guy Thompson is "'A Road Less Travelled': The dark side of R.D.Laing's conception of authenticity".

DECEMBER 2011

I have some work in a group show, 'You Are Here', at Stockroom Gallery.

Opening: 4.30 pm, Saturday 10th December 2011, 98 Piper St, Kyneton, VIC

Magnetic Passage

collage on paper (2012)

NOVEMBER 2011

My story & image of 'Antique Snails' is included in Leah Annetta's book 'Sunday Service: A History of the Camberwell Market'.

Launch: 10 am, Sunday 5th November 2011, Camberwell Market, Camberwell, VIC

I created the artwork for the book 'On Being a Supervisee' by Michael Carroll & Maria C. Gilbert. It is a collage piece, created from old suspension files used for filing cabinets. More colours than just 'manilla', I was pleased to discover!

I provided the image for The Shift Theatre's new production 'The Girls in Grey', showing at La Mama, Carlton.

An illustration for an article 'Barking Mad: Too much therapy is never enough' by Andee Jones, published in the November issue of 'Psychotherapy in Australia' journal.

Savina Hopkins

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