ONE of Canberra’s most in-demand costume designers is leaving town, but not before she’s put the finishing touches to her designs for the new Mill Theatre Company created in a revamped warehouse in Dairy Road.

Fiona Victoria Hopkins, who trained professionally in London and made an early career acting in horror films there before returning to Canberra, is moving to the Gold Coast.

She’s a woman  on the move, dividing her time between Australia and Los Angeles, where she pursues film interests through her own production company, Mirror Mirror Productions.

She was the go-to designer when National Opera was staging on “La Clemenza di Tito” in 2021 and recently called upon by Karla Conway from Hothouse Theatre in Wodonga to whip up 23 costumes at short notice – she was the right person to ask.

Hopkins is known for her interest in wearable art and costumes sourced from recycled materials, soon to be seen in the in the sepia-tone costumes she is creating for “The Torrents” by Oriel Gray,  the premier production for Lexi Sekuless’s new Mill Theatre Company at Dairy Road.

A co-winner with Ray Lawler’s “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” in the 1955 Australian Playwrights’ awards, “The Torrents”, set in a gold-mining district in the 1890s, pursues themes of discrimination and economic disruption.

“We are nomadic, we have to move around,” Hopkins says, using the plural to indicate theatrical artists in general. “When you’ve got it in your blood you move wherever you have to go, but it doesn’t mean you don’t call somewhere home.”

That “somewhere” is Canberra  where, after returning from England to join her sister and brother who live in the ACT, she found it to be “my safe haven, my gilded cage”.

Living as as an independent artist, she is best-known as a designer, but has also worked at Canberra Theatre Centre as a wardrobe technician, on a screen-acting course with Canberra Youth Theatre and for Perform Australia as an acting coach, where she says, she can “share with students all that I’ve learnt… I want to be like the angel on their shoulder.”

Her primary moving reason for moving to the Gold Coast is personal, but it’s a timely move for Hopkins because of the burgeoning Australian film industry centred there  and she already has lots of contacts in Queensland accolades from Screen Canberra.

Hopkins has worked with Sekuless several times, first on Christopher Stollery’s outdoor production of “Twelfth Night” for Lakespeare and then on a pandemic-time production, “Rockspeare Richard III,” staged and streamed out of Exhibition Park, for which she designed an extraordinary gown worn by Sekuless playing Lady Anne. Those designs won her a Canberra Critics Circle Award.

Describing Sekuless is “a very entrepreneurial lady”, she says their working relationship is based on “that passion for theatre that we live and breathe… Lexi recognises my artistry.”

Hopkins is known for the research that she’s goes into for her costumes, a part of her training, so in looking back to the 1890s when the play is set, she felt she had to “ go into the albums and history books and breathe fresh life into them for a theatre space”.

“The Torrents”, Mill Theatre, Dairy Road precinct, previews November 16-19, then runs November 23-December 3.