SAMMY HAWKER

Chromatograms are the visual expression of vibrant matter - a literal self-portrait of the materials being used to create them. When making chromatograms I am a facilitator of the process - the outcome cannot be controlled and expectations must be let go.

I borrow the term ‘vibrant matter’ from a book by American philosopher Jane Bennet - she considers “what are the political implications of recognising matter that exists outside of the human…as forces, with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own.”

While traditionally used by agronomists to check soil quality I have been testing the method with many other materials - including trees, seaweed, dead insects and even human ashes - to extraordinary results.

The more I engage with the process, the more I’ve become convinced of an energetic resonance or memory that is inscribed within the materials. Working with ashes or ‘dead’ matter yields consistently vivid, striking & sometimes eerie results.

Disintegration can also be thought of as metamorphosis & sometimes it feels the essence of a material is not necessarily tied to form. It feels the process of chromatography gives voice to this essence that survives the many alchemical transitions it might pass through. 

“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 | Exhibition Essay
Dr Kirsten Wehner, Director PhotoAccess

“Chromatography, in Hawker’s hands, becomes a kind of requiem, a post-mortem metamorphosis that distills the subject into its elemental components. These pieces are at once memento mori and meditations on the intangible, infinite, and mutable nature of existence. Her work gestures toward a spiritual unity and an unseen connectivity residing in every insect, tree, and molecule, revealed only through an interaction between natural and scientific-humane processes. And this connection can only be resuscitated through careful inspection and in-syncness with her art as a viewer.”

Basta Magazine Feature
Iker Veiga, 2025