Spadge Hopkins - Artist
Spadge Hopkins is creating on a full time basis, informed by experience gained during a creative career that involved leadership, product design, the music industry and automotive engineering. Currently he tends to work in three dimensions and in metal.
His first mainstream public exhibition was in Ipswich in 2015 but he has been practicing and studying autodidactically, producing varied work for colleagues, friends and family since the 1980s. Initial influences were Miro, Kandinsky and the Pop Art movement.
Duchamp, Tinguely, and Man Ray are influences but David Smith and Alexander Calder remain the strongest.
Spadge’s first serious works were conceptual. The Machin(sic) series are made of found mechanical components in order to explore questions of value.
Adapting the Nouveau Realiste aesthetic that favoured the use of everyday and discarded objects for poetic ends, they have been purposely made from many perfectly serviceable, valuable and high specification components. The sculptures are also an expression of Spadge’s appreciation of the form and function of mechanical components that are so often unseen when they are performing their intended task.
His Copper Sculptures are variously figurative and explore two of the binaries of sculpture; volume and void; whilst playing with the use of light and shadow and whose form is also influenced by the work of Alexander Calder.
Spadge enjoys the various colours of copper, particularly after heat treatment and lacquer, the combination of the metal with the shining solder and the fluidity of the shapes achievable with this type of construction. Movement is a conscious theme in his natural history subjects whereas other pieces often concern mystery and the evocation of the past.
A public art, rock-music themed commission for the City of Cambridge in 2016 and a continuing fascination with the subject, movement and shadow has led Spadge into producing a unique series of drawings, laser cut in metal which he calls his 'Rock Faces'. These are lit in various ways and often move within the piece via small electric motors.
The techniques of using laser cut metal learnt from his rock faces series has progressed into making dogs, hares and birds. These vary in scale from small indoor curlews etc. to large Cormorants on public display along the River Deben in Woodbridge and have led to a number of individual commissions.
Spadge has also curated a number of exhibitions. He lives and works in a Victorian School just over the border in Norfolk so his studio will not be open as part of SOS. He has strong links with Suffolk, London, Cambridge and the West Country. He is a SOS committee member and is heavily involved with the exhibitions we run.
