“Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world. Under her gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper.”

Art Guide Feature
Camilla Wagstaff
9 jul. 2025

My multi-disciplinary practice interrogates the spectral presence of environmental shifts and the potential of interspecies dialogue. I work across photography, printmaking, text, sculpture, sound and moving image. expand
reciprocity (link)

*Whale Song Cymatic Figure (Maia #4)*, 2025

“Sammy Hawker's photographs hum and crackle and whisper with a compelling sentience that evades most ordinary landscape images. But then Hawker's photographs are anything but ordinary...”

Art Collector
Profile by Jo Higgins
Issue No. 107 | jan. — mar. 2024

*With Nature* | Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Image credit: Brenton McGeachie

Analogue Film Processing

quote from Virginia

“Hawker has a very expanded idea of the studio. A set of open lipped glass jars for collecting water, lines of string for hanging negatives to dry in the wind, thick ragpaper, a wide brimmed hat and sturdy boots to clamber, a detailed diary of notes to record activity, a laptop and the cameras; the medium format 6x6 Mamiya C330 that forces the creation of a view by looking down into a reverse reflection and the large format 4x5 Linhof Technika.”

Salt, 2023
Virginia Rigney, Senior Curator CMAG

*Conversation with bees* | Goulburn Regional Art Gallery
Image credit: Silversalt Photography

Chromatography

Chromatography is a photographic process invented in 1900 and commonly used by scientists to understand the chemical makeup of soil. I have has been testing the process’s capacity to facilitate the visual expression of a wide range of vibrant matter including trees, dead invertebrates and human ashes. The hues and patterns that form as the solution spreads over the silver nitrate-soaked paper cannot be predetermined or controlled. More about this process here.

“Sammy is less interested in showing the world as image and more interested in producing artefacts that are inseparably part of the world and which embody within them the forces of time and chemistry and light distinctive to particular places in the world. This is true of all her works, but perhaps most evident in her series of chromatograms, in which the ‘image’, if we can call it that, emerges as a direct, non-representational trace of the interactions of place-specific physicality as expressed in soils and waters.”

Acts of Co-Creation, 2021
Dr Kirsten Wehner, Director PhotoAccess

Cymatics