Helen Hopcroft

Biography

Helen Hopcroft completed a Masters degree in painting at London's Royal College of Art in 1994 and a BFA at the University of Tasmania from 1989-1991. After graduating from the RCA she lived and worked in London for a number of years, finding herself in the middle of the YBA era, living and working in a Brixton studio complex. In 2000 she returned to Australia to live and participated in that year's Adelaide Festival with a solo show of paintings, with one of her painted images forming the basis of the festival's poster.

Hopcroft teaches Creative Arts at Newcastle University and works as a freelance writer for a number of new media and print publications including The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, unsweetened (UNSW literary review) and ArtsHub. Hopcroft has exhibited nationally and internationally and has works in a number of prominent private and public collections. She is currently working on her first novel and on paintings for a solo exhibition at Despard Gallery in September 2008.

Artist's statement

A couple of years ago I became fascinated by the Australian landscape, but not necessarily what you can touch and feel when you look around you. I was interested in the geological layers of the earth, underground water courses and boreholes, subterranean caves and voids.

At about the same time there was a fairly frenetic debate about the recording of Australian history; which stories were authentic, whose point of view should be recorded, how to structure these narratives. To me these two themes merged and I started painting the secret history of this country; the hidden graves, forgotten massacres and waves of European settlement.

The two separate sources of imagery became entwined and layers of subterranean rock started to be depicted alongside historical images, both real and invented. In an attempt to merge European and indigenous landscape painting traditions, I would use a combination of traditional pictorial perspective and flattened space coupled with more direct points of view. So for example the plane of a sky may be painted as if it receded but the layers of subterranean earth may be painted as if viewed from above. I loosely titled this body of work my 'history of australia' series.