Sara Hopp: The Beauty of Batik
Sara Hopp’s Beauregard Town kitchen doubles as an art studio. A pancake griddle sits on a busy table. On top of the griddle, hardened wax fills out every crevice of a well-worn aluminum baking pan. A repurposed tuna can sits beside the griddle—its insides slick with the remnants of cooled wax.
Seemingly ordinary objects become instruments of her process. Hopp is a tactile artist with a simple need to craft and shape with her hands. She holds up a cut-up block of dense foam—the kind that might used to weather-strip a home. A bin nearly as tall as the kitchen table is filled with all sorts of useful art supplies. Crockpots, for example, have no value for Hopp’s kitchen or meal preparation. Rather, they are crucial in her process of creating vibrantly dyed and whimsically patterned handmade textiles and serve as convenient hot plates for warming and melting wax.
Hopp, whose small business is called “5 o’clock crows,” creates practical art. Napkins, tea towels, quilts, pillows, potholders and scarves form her repertoire of everyday usable art and provide obvious functionality on top of the eye-catching aesthetic. Her major in printmaking from Syracuse University gave way to a master’s degree in fine arts in printmaking from LSU in 2002 and eventually led her to a full-fledged small business.
Hopp became enamored by the process of her craft. To anyone unfamiliar with the batik dying method that she uses to breathe life onto her canvas of plain, untreated linen, the process seems involved. First, there is the melting of the wax, which takes place in a crockpot or in a pan on top of the skillet. Frying wontons for dinner once, she recalled, became an unexpected tutorial on how to manipulate oil’s temperature to get a desired outcome. After Hopp melts the wax and brings it to just the right heat—hot enough to penetrate the fabric, but not hot enough to burn all the way through—she manipulates the wax with stamps she has made out of the weather-stripping foam.
Super-glued to a piece of Plexiglas, Hopp immerses the stamp into the wax and presses her design onto her fabric. The wax acts as barrier for the dye, so that once the wax is eventually boiled off, what is left is textile with beautifully imperfect splashes of patterned color. If the job is especially large, Hopp has been known to use a crawfish-boil pot for this step.
On one hand, Hopp said she finds her artistic process meditative and repetitive in nature. On the other, it is wildly spontaneous—a series of experiments that produce a riff on the original conception. While there is always a degree of meticulous planning, the materials involved in batik dying naturally involve a bit of surprise. Wax, malleable as it may be, can crack during the dying process.
The result: a nearly non-replicable octagon-stamped tea towel with a bit of tie-dyed flair. Thus, each of her products is truly one of a kind.
“Organic growth” is how Hopp describes her work. There is virtually no empty space on Hopp’s products. The repetition she endorses entrances her until she has “filled the field,” as her art professors used to note. And while the finished product may be an unplanned delight, Hopp is sure to use shapes that have the potential to create meaningful symbolic patterns.
Details. Details. Details.
You can keep up with Hopp’s work and whereabouts at fiveoclockcrows.blogspot.com.
She occasionally sells at the Red Stick Farmers’ Market and on her Etsy page: etsy.com/shop/5oclockcrows?ref=em