Cristín Leach visits Joanna Hopkins’ recent exhibition, which presents as a deeply personal engagement with communal, multigenerational wisdom
When Joanna Hopkins was Visual Artist in Residence at Dublin City University during 2020–1, she researched the folklore of plants associated with healing in the National Folklore Collection. This resulted in her exhibition ‘Sympathetic Soup’. Some of that work made it into her recent solo show, ‘Fruity Bodies’, which ran at GOMA Gallery of Modern Art in Waterford. The exhibition featured video, installation, print, embroidery and photography, furthering her exploration of ideas to do with natural sustainability and the nature of the human body in the land.
‘The six months where I finalised everything for GOMA were the culmination of two years’ work,’ she says. ‘I would see it as a continuation of the work I developed in DCU. The ideas germinate, seed and grow.’
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