Kathleen Hawkes is an artist
working in photography, drawing and digital image making. She was born in Ithaca, New York. Hawkes holds a BFA from Cornell University
and a MFA from the University of New Mexico. Hawkes spent 2012 on a Fulbright in Fiji working on a photography
project. She is an Assistant Professor
of Photography in the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin in La
Crosse.
View more of Kathleen's work here
Dusk Artist Statement
Feelings of attachment, belonging, estrangement and loss are
essential to my process of art making. Discarded pastries, broken dishes, mended
clothing and worn sheets in my work are metaphorical stand-ins for home
and the fragility of emotional attachment. I use the camera to embalm the
beauty of what is passing. I am drawn
to the fraying edges, peeling wallpaper and minute cracks in the façade of the
family home. These details are
symbolized in freezing passing cherry blossoms, submerging domestic linens in
milk, and covering place settings in dust.
There is a fragile balance between presence and absence that I am trying
to address, by capturing a tipping-point between wholeness and
destruction. By
experimenting with commonplace things I confront the tenuous nature of the
physical body and emotional vulnerability.
We play out our emotional dramas
physically; we touch, smell, taste, scream, tear open, push away, and pull
close. Through literal flatness I access the corporeal and attempt to bypass
the representational. I want the experience of my photographs to be
immediate and visceral. I print so that the objects depicted are
slightly larger than life to highlight the minutiae of the edges, bubbles, or
residue. I try
to embed the experience of senses other than sight, such as the scent that
lingers in a room, the slightest touch, certain auditory pitches, and the
density of air. These encounters illustrate physical proximity yet express
emotional distance.
No comments:
Post a Comment