Black white white black by Louise Hopkins, acrylic ink on comic pages on wood panel.

Kerry Patterson took in the latest show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

Artists have been using everyday materials in their work since the earliest days of modern art. Louise Hopkins uses a variety of materials, such as furnishing fabric, newspapers, song sheets, maps and comic strips, as the basis for her work.

Her exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on display until December 11 2005, shows how she has used such materials in innovative and challenging ways for the past decade.

Hopkins first became known for her works using flower patterned fabric, in which she recreated parts of the fabric pattern on the reverse side of the material, adopting the same style and using tiny, delicate brushstrokes.

Relief (739), 2005 by Louise Hopkins, oil paint on patterned furnishing fabric.

She later used maps as a source material. In two of the works on display she has obscured the sea with a network of roads and cities, and painted over the land in the same colour as the sea. These works are painstakingly painted using the same techniques as the original source to produce something which is familiar but disorientating.

In this way, Hopkins makes us question the information we take in on a daily basis. As with the works using fabric as a source, she uses the structure of the original maps and works with it, but also goes beyond to create a new and unique work of art.

Hopkins has also made art using newspapers. In these pieces, she has obscured the photographs and important words in the sentences using black paint. This leaves only the ‘its, ands, thes and ofs’ – the seemingly insignificant but vital words which give structure to the information we read in newspapers.

Most recently, Hopkins has been creating works using comic strips. Again, she uses erasing as a creative process, removing all words and pictures to leave only thought and speech bubbles, which are painted in black and white.

Black white white black by Louise Hopkins (detail), acrylic ink on comic pages on wood panel.

This draws our attention to the previously unnoticed structure of the comic strip and encourages us to think creatively about what the story may be, working only from the small amount of remaining information.

The large painting on fabric Relief (739) was commissioned for the Fruitmarket Gallery exhibition. Here, Hopkins returns to painting on the reverse of fabric, as in her earliest works.

Relief (739), 2005 (detail) by Louise Hopkins, oil paint on patterned furnishing fabric.

Using the same style of brushstrokes as the original fabric to paint on the fabric, Hopkins covers the entire material with small brushstrokes, painting not only the pattern of leaves and berries but also the spaces in between.

In so doing, Hopkins makes us aware of this space, which previously took second place to the pattern and works both with and against the structure of the source to create an entirely new piece.

Throughout this exhibition, Hopkins explores the means of transferring information, as well as concepts of structure and space. Her work is not only fascinating and thought-provoking but also visually appealing.