Individuals: Visual Artists: Judith Kreps Hawkins

Artist's Statement

There is beauty, obvious or hidden, in every creature and every object. When this beauty speaks to me, I find myself sculpting with odd and diverse materials – plant and animal skins, artifacts of consumerism, skeletons of metal and bone, sometimes even paint on canvas.

Bio

About 10 years ago, another student called me “a bag lady with a fertile imagination”, and she may have had a point.

My artistic career has been relatively brief, but my exposure to the arts began a half-century ago in tiny seaside villages in the southwest of England, where my father made his living as a creative photographer. Before I turned to the arts myself, I studied midwifery and nursing in London, emigrated to Canada, and raised a family in Montreal. In the mid-1990s, I completed a fine arts degree at Concordia, and then re-settled in Northumberland County.

My studio, a small cottage overlooking the Lake Ontario shoreline, contains a huge variety of “art supplies” – boxes of small springs, antique blue flashbulbs, shimmering ribbons of cloth, dried seed pods, dozens of colours of nail polish. I have made my home in big cities, and in sparsely settled moors; I have studied the human race through careful drawings of the unadorned body, and in the urgent and highly technological realm of hospitals. Perhaps that is why, in my multimedia sculptures, there is no line between the “natural” and the “artificial”. At some level, everything we see around us is a result of imagination, and what could be more natural than imagination?

Experience

Closely connected with my experiences in the healing arts is the awareness that we are our own healers, and as such my own work is vital to me. Teaching, and sharing the fun of experimenting with ideas, materials & techniques in workshop settings is a great source of inspiration for me. So is the making and custom designing of pregnancy belly-casts for mothers-to-be.

My studio is open by appointment only and I welcome all enquiries.

Email:
Website: www.judithkrepshawkins.com