Tim Hawkinson (model entry)

Tim Hawkinson is a contemporary sculptor from California. His work is from a pluralist approach. Many pieces do not resemble one another unlike most artist's work. The similarity lies in concept. His work begins with clever ideas that usually involve movement and change over time. His craftsmanship is unlike most sculptors as well. Bent wires, plastic buckets, exposed bolts, duct tape, and fingernail clippings are all things that most sculptors, including myself, don't want viewers to see. in his case, these items become part of the piece or are the piece. He once made the skeleton of a bird out of his own nail clippings. Another piece is a chicken egg made from pulverized nail clippings mixed with super glue. He made a crude contraption that writes and rewrites his own signature on receipt paper and continuously cuts them off and drops them to scatter onto the gallery floor. When I saw his mid-career retrospective in Los Angeles 5 years ago I was very tempted to take one of them! There is a monolithic teddy bear on the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology campus made out of about 8 giant stacked boulders and a several room sized installations that use viewers as musical conductors that arrange percussion and wind instruments made from PVC, plastic, and wood. I really respect his work because of his unorthodox approach and use of material. Humor, play, time, and identity are all very important themes in his work.

Below is a bio from PBS.


"Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco, California in 1960. A graduate of San Jose State University, he later earned his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989. Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. His installation “Überorgan”—a stadium-size, fully automated bagpipe—was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. Hawkinson’s fascination with music and notation can also be seen in “Pentecost,” a work in which the artist tuned cardboard tubes and assembled them in the shape of a giant tree. On this tree the artist placed twelve life-size robotic replicas of himself, and programmed them to beat out religious hymns at humorously irregular intervals. The source of inspiration for many of Hawkinson’s pieces has been the re-imagining of his own body and what it means to make a self-portrait of this new or fictionalized body. In 1997 the artist created an exacting, two-inch tall skeleton of a bird from his own fingernail parings, and later made a feather and egg from his own hair. Believable even at a close distance, these works reveal Hawkinson’s attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time. Hawkinson has participated in numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Venice Biennale (1999), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (2000), the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada (2000), the Whitney Biennial (2002), and the 2003 Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C. Tim Hawkinson resides in Los Angeles with his wife." PBS Art 21