Tim HawkinsonThe Mad Scientist, the Tinkerer

portrait of man with glasses in a bricked room with bright windows
Portrait of Tim Hawkinson, 2005. Photo by Frank Jackson.

Drawings, paintings, sculpture, video, and sound make up Tim Hawkinson’s unconventional and wide-ranging practice. Working primarily with imagery of the body and mechanical devices, the artist explores themes of corporeality, spirituality, and mortality in diverse works such as skeletal ink impressions of his own body, timepieces, and Signature (1993), an automated machine that signs the artist’s name. A kind of mad scientist or tinkerer,1 Hawkinson explores the human form and machines by “converting and reconstituting commonplace things into objects of wonderment.”2 Drawn to found and reclaimed objects—the artist’s parents owned an antique shop3—like eggshells, fingernails, feathers, or discarded cardboard, Hawkinson’s materials lend themselves to the surreal quality of his work, in which “reality is broken down into pieces and then rebuilt.”4

  1. See Valerie Fletcher, Tim Hawkinson (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2001), and Steve Erickson, “What’s He Building in There?” in Tim Hawkinson, ed. Tim Nye (New York: Nyehaus and Foundation 20–21, 2007). ↩︎

  2. Howard N. Fox, “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Tim Hawkinson,” in Tim Hawkinson, ed. Lawrence Rinder (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005), 34. ↩︎

  3. Lawrence Rinder, “My Favorite Things,” in Tim Hawkinson, ed. Lawrence Rinder (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005), 24. ↩︎

  4. Steve Erickson, “What’s He Building in There?” in Tim Hawkinson, ed. Tim Nye (New York: Nyehaus and Foundation 20–21, 2007). ↩︎