Tim Hawkinson
American, 1960-

Foot Quilt, 2007
Silver polyester fabric and Dacron batting
78 x 245"

Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery, New York

COMMENTS

Tim Hawkinson's fantastical works suggest the profound strangeness of life, matter, and time. Interweaving images of bodies and machines, at scales that vary from the monumental to the nearly microscopic, Hawkinson conjures a world that teeters on the cusp between the real and unreal. From his visually compelling miniature sculptures of birds and bird eggs entirely made from his own fingernail clippings, to his huge, sprawling mechanical wind instruments constructed of inflatable plastic tubes and ducts, Hawkinson's oeuvre is a meditation on nature, machines, the body and human consciousness.

Best known for his large-scale kinetic and sound-producing sculptures, Hawkinson has also created important works in photography, drawing, printmaking, and painting. Anticipating the do-it-yourself aesthetic that has recently become so ubiquitous, he has, since the late-1980s, been using found objects and handcrafted materials and machines to create idiosyncratic works that are intensely personal yet seemingly scientific in the rigorousness of their processes. Virtually all of his works are made with common or store-bought materials endowing his pieces with a mysterious sense of familiarity and accessibility. He brings to these familiar materials, however, a sense of inventiveness that inspires surprise, wonder, and even awe.

The central subject of Hawkinson's work is often his own body, which he inflates, measures, weighs, reflects, and animates. Rather than creating conventional self-portraits, Hawkinson uses his own physical form as a starting point for investigations into material, perception, and time. His analytical approach is often balanced by a suggestion of spirituality, as in Balloon Self-Portrait (1993) that consists of a life-size latex cast of the artist's body that has been inflated and hovers off the gallery floor like an apparition. In other works, though, Hawkinson reduces his 'self' to a simple machine effect, as in the kinetic sculpture, Signature (1993), which ceaselessly inscribes the artist's own signature.

- "Tim Hawkinson," Traditional Fine Arts Organization Resource Library, Web, n.d.
[The Whitney Museum of American Art provided source material to Resource Library for this article.]

This massive sculpture made of silver polyester fabric and Dacron batting is described as a giant silver tapestry magnifying a photographic scan of the artist’s heavily-creased sole, “Foot Quilt” is one of those works you can stare at for hours on end. Like a Rorschach inkblot, it’s meaning lies in the eye of the beholder.

- Keith Barber, Yes Weekly, Web, 21 July 2010


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

BORN 1960, SAN FRANCISCO
LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES

Tim Hawkinson makes almost everything by hand, transforming ordinary materials into fantastical works of art. The power of his work often lies in the juxtaposition between the personal and universal.

Foot Quilt is a large-scale quilt stitched to resemble the bottom of the artist’s foot. To create this piece, he projected an image of his foot onto a massive swath of silver fabric, traced its lines, and stitched them with black thread. With Hawkinson’s meticulous eye and nimble hand, the mundane and lowly bottom of a foot comes to resemble an otherworldly topographic map.

The mechanical sculpture Orrery is derived from the antiquarian apparatus of the same name—a device representing the motions of the solar system. The woman’s old-fashioned hair bun, prairie dress, and the act of spinning yarn impart a sense of historicity and age. Yet closer inspection reveals peculiar, modern details such as the optical pattern of her dress. The crinkled Home Depot bag plastered on her forehead and the plastic bottles that form the spinning wheel are reminders of the consumption and waste ubiquitous in daily life.

Labour and Wait, 2013