JOANNA HOPKINS DISCUSSES HER ART PRACTICE AND A RECENT COMMUNITY ECOLOGY PROJECT AT NEPHIN NATIONAL PARK.
I hold a BA in Fine Art Painting (2007) and an MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (2011) from Limerick School of Art and Design. As part of an Erasmus Exchange programme, I spent time at an art school in France, where the curriculum wasn’t separated by disciplines. Realising I could use new methods and processes encouraged me to work with multiple mediums.
Residencies and small commissions help to support and develop my practice. In 2014, I was part of FIND, a public art project funded by Mayo Arts Office. I created a film work in an old silent cinema, commissioning a musician to create an original piano piece, with mentorship by Aideen Barry and Alice Maher. I was also mentored by Marie Brett – as part of a Residency in a care home in 2017, funded by Age & Opportunity – and by John Conway, for an Artist in the Community R&D award, funded by Create in 2022. Through funding from an Arts Council Bursary Award in 2023, Dr Eileen Hutton mentored me in ecological art approaches. I am inspired by these contemporary Irish artists whose practices are rooted in multiple mediums, with vibrant approaches to care, ecology, collaboration and experimentation. I combine my studio practice with collaborations and participatory projects by growing and making art with plants, such as The Studio at Beaufort House (2023–26) and the Soil Project (2024).
Around 2016, my digital and neuroscience interests began to intersect with plant inspired research. I explored paper making with grass across two commissions and collaborated with Mary Conroy on An Urgent Enquiry (2019). As artist-in-residence at Dublin City University in 2020, I researched native plant folklore and their medicinal qualities. Because of pandemic restrictions, I started to feature myself in my work for the first time. For my solo exhibition, ‘Sympathetic Soup’ at DCU in 2021, I made pink ceramic cabbage leaves, tracked my menstrual diary with self-portraits of blood-related flowers, and documented the collecting of seven native wildflowers on the full moon.
For my solo exhibition ‘Fruity Bodies’ at GOMA Waterford in 2023, I delved further into the folklore of plants, experimenting with plant-based inks, dyes and anthotypes. These processes are slow and seasonal. I hung a hawthorn tree in the gallery, and draped hawthorn trees with blackberry dyed wool and fabrics, to correlate seasons and the natural world with female bodily experience of cycles, decay and re-growth.
In 2025, I was invited to participate in Wilderland, a public art and community ecology project in Mayo connecting people to their local environment through engagement, embedded research, and site-responsive art in the landscape. I researched and gathered plants by walking through Nephin National Park. Dye colours were extracted in my studio and during two participatory workshops, using a method of dying with lichens, passed on from local woman, Kay Goonan.
Ring forts are rooted in folklore. I’m interested in their shifting uses over time, including how these circular cairns now share space with farms and conservation areas. Lios na Gaoithe (The Windy Fort) is a well-preserved ring fort in Nephin, which has undergone multiple uses as a burial ground and as a dwelling place. It sits gently in the park, a soft space in a gap of planted non-native conifers, holding a quiet energy, with a single hawthorn rooted at its entrance.
On the morning of the winter solstice, I filmed at Lios na Goithe, a slow sequence of movements designed by Colm Hynes Yoga, inspired by trees and sheela na gig deities. Three bodies move through the space, then remain rooted in place, wearing handmade masks and plant-dyed, embroidered leaf motifs, layered to represent a vulva. They are dyed with lichens, hawthorn, oak, buddleia and invasive rhododendron, all gathered in the National Park. This film work was scored by musicians Irish Lights and will form part of my forthcoming solo show ‘Palimpsest’ at SUIL Gallery, County Clare, in February 2027.
Joanna Hopkins is a visual artist working in video, drawing, photography and installation.
joannahopkins.com
