Kathleen Hawkes

Exploring grief, secrecy, and silent suffering, these works illustrate a personal narrative. My dear friend died unexpectedly. She was my confidant as we parented young children in tandem. We had pending travel plans, half-finished conversations, and projects in the making. All of which will remain unfinished.

In the wake of my dear friend’s death, I feel as though stable ground had been removed from beneath my feet. I struggle to reconcile the person I believed I knew, from the person who was hidden in plain sight. As I helped dismantle her home, my awareness of the many gaps in my knowledge began to emerge. I saw the hardship, imperfections, and isolation in her life. How was I unaware of her suffering? Why did I think that everything was fine? It is as though she allowed me a view of her life through a thin sliver between two curtains. I didn’t see the whole picture. I did not feel angry about the secrecy. Instead, her vulnerabilities made me love her more.

This project celebrates the beauty and contradictions of an individual life. It is my attempt to unravel the mysteries of my dear friend. It is a complex portrait of a person based on the evidence she left. Her remaining possessions are obscured in the photographs to speak to the invisible distance that stood between us. I hope the work speaks to anyone experiencing a sudden loss and those suffering silently.

May Day was my great grandmother’s birthday (1900) and my great grandfather's birthday (1896). She was a Swiss immigrant. He was an Irish immigrant. They met at a May Day dance in New York amidst the 1918 flu pandemic. Neither knew it was the other's birthday. They were married in May of 1920.

I use what remains of their wedding china to make these improvisational compositions. Like many inherited china sets, there are dishes long since missing, chipped, and broken. What was once whole is now hardly recognizable. As I arrange the surviving pieces as repeated photographic elements in an infinite number of visual relationships, I breathe new life into a disintegrating family heirloom. While playful, these pieces is also foggy and backlit. The dishes appear as though they are fading away and receding in space to suggest a sense of emotional distance and concealment of inherited generational trauma.

The works in this exhibition explore adaptability in response to an ever-shifting environmental baseline. Admittedly, instead of a formal statement, a better representation of my thinking would be a sketched concept map, erased and rewritten many times over. The precariousness of our environmental future remains an overwhelming tangled web that is not easily solved or explained. Thus, I have not fully reconciled the seemingly disparate concepts and imagery that exist together in this exhibition.

The works share a subtle confusion between presence and absence. It is not clear whether objects are waxing or waning, concave or convex, wilting or blooming, fleeting or persistent. There are structures and grid systems that are slowly eroding, teetering on the edge of being recognizable. Some of the works are specific references while others stand as broad metaphors for scarcity and depletion of resources. For example, evaporating pools, deflated balloons, empty spaces, obscured views, and the loss of gravity.

This activity is made possible through a grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council in cooperation with a private foundation.

Anthropocene refers to the current era in which humankind is actively altering the global ecosystem. Thinking of our planet’s precarious environmental future is overwhelming and hard to reconcile. This exhibition attempts to capture what this anxious, uncertain and disabling moment feels like.

To create the photographic works I combine layers of photographed candy, cheap trinkets, bits of plastic, and other mass-produced, disposable consumer goods. I see these objects as stand-ins for the elemental building blocks of matter. And, I wonder how our elemental understanding of the earth will shift in the future. I compose the images to exaggerate a tipping point between presence and absence. I want to access a fleeting moment of confusion between positive and negative space, macro and micro scale, flatness and depth, and chaos and order. The photographs are printed large scale to highlight subtle imperfections and residue of the objects, and to make the viewer’s experience more immersive and immediate.

This activity is made possible through a grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council in cooperation with a private foundation.

I am interested in the experience of one’s childhood home through adult eyes. Embarking on this photography project, my initial impulse was to search for my dreamlike childhood memories of the South Pacific that I longed to relive. However, returning to this region as an adult I found that, of course, during my time away Fiji had changed and so had I. So, I threw out my preconceived notions of what I ought to photograph, and instead let the camera and Fiji guide me. I spent a year photographing anything and everything – a curiosity driven collection of information, stories and scenes that struck me as beautiful. Afterward I edited and sequenced the photographs to construct a story of contemporary Fiji as the graceful, proud, historically and culturally complex, globally conscious nation that I find it to be. I am interested in the beauty of a layered, dense and eclectic vision of the Pacific.

I do not see these artworks as a definitive statement. Instead I enjoy how photographs are able to dance around the edges of complex issues – often raising more questions than they answer. With this work I address a delicate and ever-shifting balance between presence and absence, interior and exterior, and private and public spaces. I am drawing a visual and conceptual tension between dense overgrowth and the vastness of open sea, geographical remoteness and cultural connectedness, vulnerability and self-sufficiency, and natural beauty and imposed order. I am interested in exploring how all of these themes intersect and manifest on a personal level and find myself drawn to the photographs that directly image ideas of home and family.

There are several portraits in this series. Some are the result of comfortable collaborations with the individual pictured. Other portraits speak more to an awkward distance between the subject and me, a white American photographer. Though I have grown up longing to return and to fit into Oceanian culture, I feel it is also appropriate to address my role as a cultural outsider.

My deepest gratitude goes to all of the people who allowed me to photograph their families, their homes and their belongings, who shared their personal stories and opened their lives, and were the most gracious hosts. Further, this project and exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the Fulbright Program, which offered me the unique opportunity to return to a place that once was a home. Thank you also to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Law and Education, the Head of School and staff of the School of Social Sciences, and the staff of OCACPS for your support, discussions, time, energy and advice, and for involving me in your scholarly community.  I thank the Gallery of Oceanian Art for all of the unseen support that any exhibition involves, and for generously hosting this exhibition.

Feelings of belonging, estrangement, ambivalence 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 fragile nature of sentimental attachment.

There is a fugitive balance between presence and absence that I am trying to address, by capturing a tipping-point between wholeness and destruction. 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. Tenderness for these details is symbolized in freezing passing cherry blossoms, submerging domestic linens in milk, and covering place settings in dust. By experimenting with commonplace things I confront the tenuous nature of the physical body and emotional vulnerability.

I want the experience of my photographs to be immediate and visceral. Through literal flatness I attempt to access the corporeal and bypass the representational. I print so that the objects depicted are slightly larger than life to highlight the minutiae of the edges, bubbles, or residue.

It seems that emotional drama is often played out physically by screaming, tasting, tearing open, pushing away, and pulling close. I try to embed the experience of senses other than sight, such as the scent that lingers in a room, the slightest touch, particular auditory pitches, and the density of air: encounters that illustrate physical proximity yet express emotional distance.