A&D ANNUAL 2021

Savanna Hopkinson

Savanna Hopkinson (b. London, 1998) is an emerging, multidisciplinary artist graduating from a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from UNSW School of Art & Design. Savanna lives and works between the unceded lands of the Gundungurra and Darug people (Blue Mountains), and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people (Paddington). She works predominantly with image, installation, clay and glass whilst employing methodologies of simultaneity, fragmentation and unfixed assemblage. Savanna engages with rock formations to observe and record intra-actions between the lithic site and the site of the body. Her work exists at the intersection of ontological and geological fields of enquiry, where geologies can be reimagined through art practice to exceed dominant modes of enquiry and develop expanded ecological understandings.Savanna’s research project 'LITHICBODY' is a practice of observing, researching, and learning with lithic formations. Materiality becomes a learning apparatus in this body of work to depart from the mechanisms and embodied practices that bring about particular ways of knowing. In turn, the project resists the compatibility and standardisation that occurs as materiality shifts towards the discursive.