b. 1980 in Bowral, NSW, Australia
Lives and works in Sydney, Australia
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.
Hawkes states:
I am obsessed by the seemingly endless vitality and flexibility inherent to the act of drawing. Being arguably one of the oldest modes of communication there is something so deeply rooted, open, adaptive and non- exclusive about the practice of making marks on a surface in various ways to embody an idea or sensation.
When I work I’m aware of a tension between a painting being a container for thought, for illustrating ideas and demonstrating knowledge, and it being an attempt at approaching the ineffable; its mutability, inarticulacy and instability reflecting something of life as I feel it and live it and less as I try to construct it or resolve it in the form of ideas and language. My work seems to me, to be a product of this ferment between containment and things being or going out of reach.
In 2020, Hawkes exhibited in Real Worlds: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial. In 2019, Hawkes was a finalist in the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia. He has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Marten Bequest travelling scholarship, and the Asa Masakusa Award. Between 2013 and 2015 he was an artist in residence at Australia House, Japan and exhibited at the 2015 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. In 2017 the Australia Council for the Arts funded an extended visit to Sweden where he worked with internationally acclaimed artist Andreas Eriksson, and his work has been collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
