Entoptically Yours comprises three intricate cave scenes: large-scale works on paper rendered in colored pencil and ink. These visceral, emotive and sexual netherworlds recall tourist postcards, sci-fi book-covers, fantasy websites, or perhaps Blake’s mystical illuminations.

With incredibly subtle gradations of color, and masterful and complex depictions of light, Hopkins creates charged, phosphorescent landscapes. Her palette moves from rich magentas and bloody reds to acidic greens and luminous yellows caught within planes of deep blackness. Beams of light – explorers’ torches? – give the caves’ architecture their life. Objects and landscapes, rays and shadows, form and reform in dynamic configurations, suggesting bleached flesh, internal organs, temples, subterranean oceans, or grand theatrical sets, anticipating a drama’s commencement.

Hopkins draws inspiration from the concept of entoptic phenomena, visual effects that result from stimuli from within the eye itself, such as patterns seen when the eyes are pressed closed, or psychedelic forms that result from fluids crossing the eye. Her works resemble entoptic “seeing”, with their ambiguous light sources and hallucinatory structures.

Hopkins’ caves are meditations on perception and connotation. Over the ages, the cave has represented home, the womb, the void, and the unknown, and has been central to discourses on perception, art-making, and the subconscious. Tapping this over-determination, Entoptically Yours highlights the complex workings of the visual imagination, while unleashing a range of associations and recollections.