Agenda

The phrase ‘cultivate your own garden’ takes on new meaning in the art of Georgie Hopton (b. 1967). The British artist treats her garden as a palette, growing abundant produce on the Upstate New York farm she shares with her husband, the painter Gary Hume, and using the fruits of her labour to create extraordinary monoprints and collages. Disrupting the traditional notion of the still-life, she selects flowers, fruit and vegetables from her garden, then divides them up and reincarnates them into new forms. The resulting work is both abstract and figurative, decorative and expressive, familiar and fantastical. 

For Hopton, her garden is not only an inspiration but also an essential ingredient: 

‘Each summer I gather my excess crop, haul it into the studio and cut it up. Dried flower stems crammed into vases, gathered the season previous, the Leather Leaf Viburnum outside the door, thicker and brighter, despite my annual plucking, and the harvest heap, all await my usual pilfering and tinkering. My work is a result of these encircling riches and the now habitual printing that feels like a natural response to all this excess.’

Because Hopton has chosen to live her life across two continents, her work has become seasonal; hunkering down through the wet London winter and into mid-spring, she makes her often large-scale collages from printed and painted papers, wool and string. Early spring sees her temporary migration to Upstate New York in time to sow seeds and again summer through autumn, where she harvests the crops to nourish and sustain both kitchen and studio. Hopton’s love of printing and collage reflects her hybrid approach to looking at art and the world. A self-proclaimed glutton, Hopton uses materials that are consumable and have the potential to feed both the artist and her work. She attributes this magpie-like habit of gathering up anything that catches her beady eye to her childhood when her mother knitted to make ends meet and the house was full of bits of fabric, wool and unravelled sweaters that would be recycled into rainbow striped jumpers.