Art Collector
Profile by Jo Higgins
Issue No. 107 | jan. — mar. 2024
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. Less a photographic practice than a process of facilitating what she describes as the voices of the materials and places she's working with, Hawker's images are acts of co-creation, active listening and immersion, literally. Hawker's 35mm film images - many of her surrounding Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri + Walbunja/Yuin Country - have been developed in water that Hawker collects from the ocean or nearby bodies of water. Interested in the expressive capabilities of salt, these unique chemical interactions with the surface of the negative evince previously unseen constellations, murky swirls and mesmerising geometric, crystalline patterns over the surface of these landscapes. Other negatives are processed further with the help of bees.
As Kirsten Wehner, James O. Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment at the National Museum of Australia & former Director of Canberra's PhotoAccess has observed, "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."
Hawker's sensitivity and care for these acts of co-creation includes relationships with traditional custodians, scientists and researchers. Relationships that, like her images, are nurtured and given time.
Asking questions of our relationship to place; considering how to make meaningful work with Country as a non-Indigenous artist; quietly imploding colonial landscape traditions and the legacy of the singular frame, Hawker's works are invested with time and create space for the contemplation of immaterial presences, not-knowing and wonder.
Little wonder then, that momentum is gathering for Hawker. Her work has been collected by the Canberra Museum & Gallery and the ACT Legislative Assembly and is receiving increasing recognition. In 2022 she was awarded the $15,000 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and in 2023 she received the Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize and was a finalist in both the Bowness Photography and Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prizes.
This year is also looking to be busy for Hawker. There's a summer residency at Sydney's Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, funded by artsACT, and her announcement as one of 14 finalists in the National Photography Prize at MAMA Albury. There is also a group exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in February and research and relationship building towards residencies and significant solo exhibitions at Orange Regional Gallery and Tweed Regional Gallery in 2025. Luckily, with all this buzz, Hawker's practice of moving slowly and with care will be sure to keep her grounded. — profile by Jo Higgins.