Statement — Carolyn di Fiori Hopkins

Artist Statement

Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins

My work begins with close observation—of the natural world, of the body, of the fragile space between things. Whether drawing, painting, layering, or building installations, I’m driven by the tension between beauty and rupture, containment and collapse. What endures in my practice is a deep love of mark-making, materiality, and the layered construction of meaning through form.

In my figure drawings, often created on transparent paper, I render ordinary people, performers, animals with anatomical sensitivity and emotional quiet. I combine these layers as a single image, allowing ghosted forms and mirrored gestures to coexist. In my paintings, botanical forms become expressive structures—branches, stems, thorny shrubs and seed pods in transformation. These are not traditional landscapes but fragments of the organic world reimagined through gesture, color, and atmospheric force.

My most recent series, Second Surface, reflects a natural evolution of my layering process. Using digital tools to recombine my own hand-drawn and painted elements, I build complex images that carry the residue of the physical: scratches, silhouettes, stains, vessel forms and other worldly images. These works are quiet and raw, like weathered memory—journeys through psychological and environmental terrain. They are not AI-generated, but digitally reflective and layered compositions drawn entirely from my archive of original works.

The results are quiet, raw, and thoughtful. They feel like something remembered or half-dreamed—familiar forms caught in weather, in shadow, in motion. Many of these are grouped in series, like chapters or songs, each set unfolding as a journey through a psychological or physical landscape. I don’t invent images from nothing—I collect, rework, and recombine what’s already mine.

Much of this work also reflects my response to the Anthropocene—the current geological age marked by human impact on the environment. Through forms that are floating, veiled, or partially buried, I explore the fragility of ecosystems and the tension between resilience and collapse. These images are not overtly didactic, but they carry traces of fire, migration, extinction, and rebirth. They ask how we endure, what we carry, and what we leave behind.

Through all of this, I try to create spaces that feel alive—shifting, veiled, and open to interpretation. The questions are there. The answers are not fixed.

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Cambridge Studio, 2024