Elizabeth Hopkins
MFA ’25 Photography
Sometimes, amidst everyday life, something unknowable plucks me from the tangle of my duties and pulls me into the light of the sublime. Time slows and I take stock of my surroundings: dust motes dance like fairies by the window; strange shapes advance across my bedroom wall. In these moments, I think of my family, the ones who have moved on. Like a rare bird, these instants briefly alight before they’re swept away.
As an artist, I am hungry for transformative experiences. I hunt for fleeting light in unremarkable places. I harness the camera in search of slippages where life’s fragility is revealed to be a source of resilience.
In my latest work, The Vermont House, I photograph a ski cabin that has belonged to my partner’s family since the 1980s. Nothing in this house changed much until a few years back, when a flood necessitated significant renovations. Yet much about the place remains the same as it was when I first visited in 2012.
My partner and I have changed in significant ways over the years. So has the house. Old and new are spliced together into something resembling continuity. As I navigate the life we are building together, I am both insider and outsider to his family. I am a thread entering a weave. As I scrutinize my surroundings in an attempt to know them as my own, I am knitting a new story of kinship. I become part of—and thereby change—a history I’ve never known.
Elizabeth Hopkins is a photographic artist and educator based in Boston, MA. She teaches at Massasoit Community College, as well as several youth and continuing education programs across New England. Hopkins has recently shown her work at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Panopticon Gallery, and Cambridge Art Association. She was a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC). In her practice, Hopkins explores themes of memory, transience, and the peculiar melancholy of the everyday.
