Nathan Hawkes named a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize

Nathan Hawkes has been named a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize for the first time, marking an exciting milestone in his practice.

Nathan Hawkes is based on the lands of the Gundungurra people in Meryla NSW. His work is based on the conviction that the processes of painting and drawing are acts of thinking in themselves rather than an illustration of preconceived ideas.

Hawkes begins without a plan, but allows the image to emerge in the iterative, call and response of material and working; the relationships that emerge on the canvas inform the next mark or gesture, which go on to shape the next.

His work is often populated with figures entangled in a commotion of mark making and chromatic activity. Some marks intimate zones of trees or human-made structures, while others remain ambiguous or multivalent. Figurative and non-figurative elements emerge or collapse together, suggesting the perpetual co-emergence of an embodied subject with the space it occupies. His large-format drawings involve scratching into the surface of paper and using rudimentary mark-making with fingers and hands, masking, sponges and a vacuum cleaner, to embody a rough-hewn euphoria and sense of renewal whilst gesturing towards an illusory perception of self in relationship to the world. It exemplifies his commitment to the exercise of drawing.

Image: Nathan Hawkes, ‘The Dominance of Language’, 2024, oil on canvas, 207.5 x 290 cm. Courtesy the artist and CHALK HORSE.