Karis Hopkinson, visual artist based in Sheffield, working primarily in digital drawing.

The work draws from a baseline interest in landscape, space, place, the history and romanticism of landscape painting, the graphic language of advertising and the city, the tension between text and image, the sensuality of word as image, the question of how we read text vs how we read image and the overlap between written and visual language. It is a relatively simplistic set of signifiers and visual tropes developed from a wide disparity of reference points. A process of simplification then, of combination. A visual mash-up of information, some clear, some obscure. Blurring lines between influences and transforming the conceptual landscape of disparate references, aesthetic and ideological notions into an image commodifies the “narrative” of it all and creates something consumable, which embodies everything of the disparity that it draws from, whilst posing and re-posing the enquiry to the viewer.

It is a recontextualisation of familiar elements and a series of contrasts with an aim to form a new visual language. The work is embracing the kitschy residue of landscape paintings romantic motif canon but using the space of the romantic landscape as more of a symbolic prop that alludes to another fragmentary reality, depicted in reference to the language of advertising and modernity; as if the Sunday supplement is collapsing in on itself. The disintegration of one type of language to form another. Playing with familiarity, presenting it as unfamiliar and unknown, and considering the unsettling nature of combining familiar aspects. In this way, the resulting graphic visual is systematically removed from landscape sensuality.

The text forms, colour planes and ambiguous shapes overlap both each other and the landscape behind. They are at once harmonious with the natural space and constantly interrupting it, creating a visual disconnect. This disconnect, this visual jolt, creates a gap of understanding that I have come to consider as integral to the success of the image. Because of the amount of contrasts within the work, the baseline idea framework that underpins it is entirely and unavoidably paradoxical. Does this form or at least connect to the visual disconnect? Creating a harmonious disconnect is the difficulty and perhaps the point.

Disconnection, interruption, obstruction, opacity, duality, inertia and flux.. Something is erased, omitted, masked, faded out, but what? Ambiguity. Is this what creates the disconnect? A dissociation from reality and place towards something elsewhere, somewhere indeterminate? Can an image be inert and in flux? The work is an enquiry into the gap of understanding, what is seen and not seen and what is suggested.