Artlink
Review by Una Rey
11 sep. 2025
Review for Worlds Around Us: Sammy Hawker | Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture
[excerpt] — A week after visiting Tweed Regional Gallery the image that has stayed with me is Humpback whale migrating south, (2024)—not strictly a portrait, but the entry point to Worlds Around Us, the outcome of Sammy Hawker’s Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence at the Gallery's studio. The exhibition fills a darkened space off the main concourse from which each window frames a picture postcard of Wollumbin / Mount Warning. The ‘dark room’ works effectively as a companion show to the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture which celebrates 20 years in 2025.
In Hawker’s grainy photographs, salt-crystals leave a residual trace on the grey seascape; in another of the three oceanic scenes, a whale’s tailfin tricks the eye, instantaneously appearing like a black-winged bird taking flight. Such fleeting illusions increase the private pleasure of looking and a metaphorical cliché offers itself as I fly out of Coolangatta days later: a barely submerged whale looking for a moment like a sinking ship registers a more poignant metaphor of collapse. Further south over the Hunter Valley, a vast open-cut coal mine completes the loop.
In concert with Hawker’s romantic quasi-vintage naturalist views, five inkjet prints made from hydrophone recordings of humpback whale song gathered off Australia’s east coast by Mark Franklin of the Oceania Project evoke the loss apparent in the Anthropocene. These monochrome mandala-like images are distilled from recordings using an analogue cymatic instrument. The effect of this underwater chorus and its mechanical reproduction is hypnotic, otherworldly, creating a beguiling art/science collaboration with environmentalist intent.
Hawker is a Canberra based artist and winner of the 2022 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, among other ‘contemporary’ and ‘national’ photographic awards, though such categories are not mutually exclusive. As for so many artists, categorisation is a double-edged sword, one that Olive Cotton reflected on late in her life.
I would not like to be labelled a romanticist, Pictorialist, modernist or any other ‘ist’. […] I want to feel free to photograph anything that interests me in whatever way I like. Helen Ennis, Olive Cotton: A life in Photography, (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins Publishers Australia: 2019), 457 — review by Una Rey.
Link to full review here.