Poppy Sebire ::::: GEORGIE HOPTON - Press / Bibliography

Carey Kent. 2010.

Georgie Hopton

Cut and Come Again @ Poppy Sebire, 232 Kings Road, Chelsea

Poppy Sebire pops up - for the third time - in a spacious former Post Office near the Old Town Hall on Kings Road. There you'll find a delightful and seamlessly interwoven show from Georgie Hopton, who is Yorkshire-born but now based in upstate New York with her husband, Gary Hume. Hopton's first London solo outing for some years sees her use the seasonal cycle and output from her garden as the inspiration and creative metaphor for a playful set of works. Photographs of Hopton interacting with vegetables sensually and economically combine the traditions of landscape, still-life, self-portrait and nude. Vegetable prints - colourful, textural and daringly redolent of the primary school classroom - make lively anthropomorphic use of shapes ranging from those of allium stems to pumpkins to produce which is exotic to English eyes: the dinosaur and crown of thorns gourds, for example. Hopton has also made bronze versions of her palette of potatoes with surprisingly bright American skins, set on a chopping board and part-painted ready to print from, all presented on a canvas on top of a plinth. The total effect is to provide a sophisticated adult context for appropriately childish glee.

Interview by Polly Resin. 2010.

Georgie Hopton grows vegetables part of her year; on a farm where she lives in the Catskill Mountains, Upstate New York. As an artist she sculpts, paints and photographs her material simply as a means to make art, object and image, it’s a compulsion. On this occasion the produce she has grown over of the past four or five years has been the inspiration, which has transformed the work from seed to sauce, from flower to fruit.

Presently exhibiting in London, with Poppy Sebire, ‘Cut and Come Again’ is showing until 29th May 2010.

We met at her studio in East London.

Polly Resin: Apparently you enjoy gardening, what are you growing this year?

Georgie Hopton: Nothing. Because I am here in England right now and not in America. There’s not a single god dam thing being grown right now. It’s horrible, my beautiful vegetable gardens lie fallow.

PR: The photography in the exhibition was taken in situ in those gardens, but I see here in the studio sculptures too. Were these made in America?

GH: The palette sculptures, came out of using the produce I had grown and had begun making prints with. They are basically potatoes on chopping board, which look like an artist palette because they have painted cut ends. I’m mad about artist palettes. I’ve collected them and made them for years. The potatoes were cast in America because you can’t send your potatoes to England without a lot of bother. Their moulds were then sent to England to a foundry I’ve been working with here.

PR: You’re working in Bronze for the first time?

GH: Yes, they have recently arrived from the foundry; it is very exciting to make a bronze sculpture when you have never done so. Its all been a huge learning curve as they didn’t come away from the foundry as I had imagined they would look.

PR: Can you elaborate?

GH: The first choice you get when asking for bronze is they can be coloured using a patina. In my head the whole sculpture was a very dark bronze with a splash of colour at the ends of the potatoes. I didn’t articulate this well; it was a strange environment so I just said I don’t want them to look gold and shiny. Bronze is gold and shiny when it’s first been cast. After the foundry had applied the patina, the wooden chopping board looked exactly like a piece of wood and that really confused me, as it still didn’t look like bronze.

I told them I was going to paint the potatoes so they offered to colour them using inks that are painted onto the bronze. The colours available were red, blue and yellow, which so happened are the same colours the potatoes I had been growing in America are naturally. Once they had done the colouring I was like ‘NO’, this isn’t supposed to happen, they look like the real thing. They’re supposed to be sculpture, not a piece of realism. It was a whole new journey, a road down which I have been learning what you can do with bronze.

PR: You paint, sculpt and grow your pieces suggesting a pleasure in developing an intimacy with each stage of your practice.

GH: It’s as simple as, ‘now I can do that with that, oh and now I can do that with that.’ It’s a matter of using something to make an image, to have it lying around and almost out of the corner of your eye see it in another way. Like noticing out of sheer desperation, here I am growing my first flowers then my first vegetables. They come up out of the ground and they look like sculptures, my relationship with them is not only one of total pleasure but that I am becoming a gardener. This notion in time turns to frustration as I think I am not a gardener I am an artist. So what the hell is going on here?

Eventually, literally gathering up some vegetables I took them into the studio at our farm plonked them on the table, folded my arms and I looked at them saying, come on, come on you, be or do something for me I can’t just be growing you and eating you it’s not enough.

It was at this point I started to take my clothes off, get my camera out and began shooting some photos. When it happened it was like a revelation. Out of that frustration had grown this final act. As soon as the step was made it became yes of course it’s work and they are materials everything in that garden is material for work because it is what I am interested in.

Full interview with images - download PDF

Spike Island. Prophe. July- September, 2008

Prophet

Georgie Hopton, Esteban Igartua & Cornelia Parker

The narrative for our future is everywhere; conveyed in headlines and research findings. So much conflicting information propelled into media authority, born by experts with a range of agendas so vast that little reliable prophesy can be extracted.

Prophet brings together the work of three artists: Esteban Igartua, originally from Lima in Peru, now based in Bristol; Georgie Hopton based in London and upstate New York, and Cornelia Parker who lives and works in London. The works selected for this show draw us into a world, both real and imagined, which in very different ways, reflects the anxieties that are beginning to characterise the first part of the 21st Century. Seen through the various perspectives and experiences of these artists, the relationship between the works, shown together for the first time, draws the shape of a future, informed heavily by the past.

Georgie Hopton’s series of works take their starting point from the tradition of still life. In her use of painting, photography and sculpture, each medium informs the other; photographs relate to the painting and the paintings are informed by the sculpture and so forth. The sculptures are rendered out of some sort of heavy material; clay, or pulped paper, we know not quite what. It is a material that needs taming, shaping, coaxing in order to make it form the leaves and petals.

The delicacy of the flowers in both the paintings, but particularly the sculptures, is lost, but delicacy is not the point. These objects are ‘flower-like’, perched atop polished plinths. The contrast of the beautiful clumsiness and the classical plinth draws us to focus on the possibly, more sober intentions: are Hopton’s collection of photographs, sculptures and paintings – the latter more object-like than paint on canvas - a collection of flowers, or an archival record? Are we to imagine that there might come a time when our climate will not remember how to nurture the real thing? Shall we, in the future, know the vibrancy of plant life only through renderings achieved through the inaccuracies and approximations of memory?

Press RElease. New Art Centre.

Roche Court. 23 Feb - 5 May 2008.

Georgie Hopton - The Three Cornered Hat

Georgie Hopton's exhibition is in the Artists' House at Roche Court, designed by Stephen Marshall, 2001, in order to show domestic scale art.

Known for her paintings and sculpture influenced by Morandi and Picasso, Hopton's inspiration for this new series of works comes solely from flowers, some of which she has grown herself. Focusing on a few particular genus, she has photographed, painted and sculpted each image, forming groups specifically for this exhibition. Her photographs of flowers, often presented in retro style vases, are deployed in strange colour combinations and appear to be depicted through some sort of filter that detaches the objects from reality. They are more painterly than photographic. Hopton's oval canvases present flowers as though spied through a window of nostalgia. Detailed, geometric and tonally limited, they have an air of loss and harking after the past. Feeling at once like embroideries or stained glass, the subjects themselves have an unmistakeable sculptural quality. The sculptures, made in clay and then cast, have a distinctly cubist feel; moving from the 3-dimensional to the 2-dimensional all at once. For Hopton, it is vital that each discipline talks about the rest and it is no accident that she moves within the 3 and does not settle on one. For her, the interesting thing is how the act of photography can produce, not a photograph, but a picture and how making a sculpture can be like painting in the air. Disturbingly, these 'monuments' to the natural world oscillate between a sort of hyperreality, whilst simultaneously eerily conjuring death.

“I've always oscillated between 3D and 2D: I graduated from college with sculptures when I'd taken a painting degree - the paintings literally moved from the walls to the floor, almost unconsciously. It felt like a very natural thing to do”. Georgie Hopton, in conversation with Louisa Buck, Laughed - I Could Have Cried, Milton Keynes Gallery 2003.

Georgie Hopton graduated from St Martins School of Art in 1989. Solo exhibitions have included Laughed - I Could Have Cried at Milton Keynes Gallery, which travelled to Firstsite, Colchester, 2003. Hopton was nominated for the Maxmara Art Prize for Women in 2007 and lives and works in London and upstate New York.

Zing Magazine, Issue 19 - By Kim Hodge. SARAH STATON, 'GREEN - OR HOW WE MISSED MODERNISM' AND GEORGIE HOPTON, 'LAUGHED - I COULD HAVE CRIED': MILTON KEYNES GALLERY - BUCKINGHAMSHIR. ENGLAND.

GEORGIE HOPTON, 'LAUGHED - I COULD HAVE CRIED'

Georgie Hopton has made some sparkly, glittery, all-singing all-dancing sculptures in the last years, but 'Laughed - I Could Have Cried' is a display of painting and sculpture in quieter and more muted hues, where her sculptures are like tableaux from mediaeval plays: small moments from the past, frozen in time. The whole show feels set in silence. This reverence is new but entirely explicable: Hopton normally works alone in a light, airy studio with great views of sky and trees and a virtually noise-free environment, but recently her peace has been disturbed by the noise of demolition and rebuilding going on across the road. Would this offensive noise-pollution, inevitable given the mass regeneration taking place in so many parts of London, have anything to do with the decrease in noise levels of her own works? Habitually working in isolation and solitude, with the inoffensive and occasional hum of Radio 4 for company, Georgie has found this recent external noise so invasive that she has filled her artworks with the calmness and quietness missing from the studio.

The non-audible state of these works is further echoed by their stillness, which is also surprising. A lover of joyous movement, especially the graceful moves found in ballet, Hopton recently performed in a video piece as a beautiful, ethereal and poised ballerina. Where her past works have hopped, skipped and jumped before the viewer's eye, these works are immobile. They are subdued and humble shots of still life in 3D form, which manage to be extreme in many aspects: extreme in their stillness (the single movement of any kind can be imagined in her sculpture 'The Juggler' where sudden, localized spots of red tumble around the feet of a delicate table); in their silence and in their smallness. And the works are small - Hopton is bothered by a lot of the big and the blasé in today's world, both in art and in life. “Big needs to be justified ” she insists and says that she couldn't justify working on any larger scale with her current pieces. The whimsical side of Hopton's nature is highlighted by the repeated use of circus-type symbols in her work. A lover of bows, Pierrots, jacardi-patterns, and the traditional artists palettes that are seen depicted in children's coloring books, Pierrot is her favourite drawn figure: “ . . . he exaggerates silently,” she says, “he's unreal but of the real and he embodies the two elements in life and art that I am most interested in: comedy and tragedy.” Considering her own quirky style of philosophising on society and its mores, the silent, watchful Pierrot is an understandable symbol for Hopton. They both appear to stand back and see a sad irony in much of what amuses the public at large, and the humour in what are often considered to be tragedies of modern life.

In a recent interview with Louisa Buck, Hopton quotes an idea of Picasso's she recently came across: “ . . . one of the most constructive things a painter can say about painting is sculpture . . .” an idea deeply echoed in her own mind. Ever juggling and changing mediums - Georgie paints and sculpts alternatively - her figurative paintings become fully-formed statues yearning to step off the canvas into a 3-dimensional world and her sculptures are actually foreshortened in real-life as if they were being produced for the 2-dimensional world of paint on canvas. Georgie, a painting student who graduated with sculpture, has long been a passionate Picasso admirer, so the discovery of a mutual understanding of the innate relationship between the two mediums must be rather pleasing to her.

There are artists, some of them yBa's, who are evangelical about their public image and love to use the furor made possible by the media to their own end. A lesser number of them, Hopton included, are simply evangelical about their art. Hopton's own quiet and introspective search isn't spotlighted in a screaming, startling world of “Where's the noise?” but what is she zealous about? Firstly, she has a fervent desire to see chronology in works of art at the new Tate, and less of those patronising signs telling you what you are going to see before you even see it. But her most evangelical quest is that of search and discovery. She believes that searches and searching are good things to undertake, they take you down a path of learning which, in turn, puts you on the road to receiving wisdom. She insists that all enquiry ends in learning and that constant search and enquiry are immeasurably important in our lives. Hopton herself learns by osmosis: she watches, reads and listens to as many differing styles of life as possible, absorption is an important part of her yearning for a daily increase in knowledge. She wants to make sure that she never stagnates, never closes down. As Georgie Hopton continues to learn from life, I wonder whether the range of her work will broaden, or whether her intensity will narrow it down to tiny, particular details for us to learn from?

Kim Hodge

Buckinghamshire, England 2003

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