Self Portrait on the Edge of Loch Linnhe
Phill Hopkins, photograph

Here’s a beautiful shot of Loch Linnhe in Scotland. Look more closely. A shadow is cast across the rocks and water. The artist is present. Phill Hopkins employs photography, drawing, painting, and small-scale sculpture to examine the world of everyday experience. Many of the photographs in his Shadow-Self series, of which this is one, are humorous and reference contemporary art and artists. But in some, there are hints of a shadow side, of the hidden violence that permeates a media-driven society. Shadow-Self has been described as ‘deliberately ambiguous in [its] suggestion … that truth, including the “truth” of the self, moves, shape shifts and is never definite’. The sun is shining, the sea is blue, but who is this in the shadows?

Art in focus is curated by Meryl Doney

Photograph: ©Phill Hopkins. See more images from Shadow-Self at https://www.phill-hopkins.co.uk/section729064_738884.html

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This article was published in the July/August 2019 edition of Reform

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