SAMMY HAWKER

When Kamberri/Canberra-based artist Sammy Hawker heard that her award-winning work Mount Gulaga (2021) had haunted a prize judge’s dreams, she wasn’t surprised. Her works have a history of whispering, shimmering, and visiting people in the night.

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.

Her processes are unpredictable. Her outcomes feel like conversations—images formed through intuition, trust, and deep listening. “There is a sense when a material wants to make work together,” Hawker says. “There is a feeling of alignment or serendipity often accompanied by a visceral sensation, like a shiver down the spine.”

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The artworks in Worlds Around Us by Sammy Hawker are interactions between the artist and the more-than-human worlds she encounters. Following the humpback whale cycle of migration along the east coast of Australia, the works explore interspecies dialogue, material presence and how a practice of curiosity cultivates empathy and care.

For Worlds Around Us Hawker worked with Australian designer Sam Tomkins to develop an analogue cymatic instrument that projects the imagery of sound vibrating through water. The hydrophone recordings of humpback whale song collected by Mark Franklin of The Oceania Project off the east coast of Australia is played through the instrument, creating a series of fascinating visuals.

more about this exhibition here.

Honeycomb #3 was recently acquired by Goulburn Regional Art Gallery to live amongst their permanent collection.

This work was co-created with a hive of honeybees cared for by Oli Chiswell on Ngunawal/Gundungurra Country and exhibited recently as part of Sammy Hawker’s solo show Conversations with bees (2024-5).

more about this exhibition here.

“Partners - The Corridor Project [AUS] and Messums | ORG [UK] wish Australian artist Sammy Hawker a huge congratulations on being awarded an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Emerging Artist Grant – Round 1. 

This support will contribute towards assisting Sammy to undergo a partnered International Artist Exchange Program & present her first international solo show ‘Ghosts [& Monsters]’ at Messums West (UK), October 2025 - exhibiting work she has been developing at The Corridor Project between 2023-5.”

This show evolved from research around the European ritual ‘telling the bees’, where honeybees are told of recent deaths in a beekeeper’s household. It is believed if the bees are not informed they might leave the hive and follow the deceased into the afterlife. It is understood the practice has its origins in Celtic mythology where bees are regarded as messengers between the natural world and the spirit realm; a portal connecting the living and the dead.

Over the past few years the artist have been delivering photographic negatives to two hives of honeybees. These images are witness to ecologically disturbed sites along the ever-shifting shoreline of Ngungara/Weereewa/Lake George.

more about this exhibition here.

Every two years the National Photography Prize offers an opportunity to consider the vital role of photography in contemporary art in Australia. The National Photography Prize brings together artists from across Australia who are developing and challenging photographic language and techniques.

The Prize provides a forum for artists working with photography to present cohesive selections of work, or works in series, offering a depth of critical reflection that recognises the complexities and nuances of the history of the photograph and its contemporary manifestation.

The 2024 National Photography Prize finalists include leading Australian artists and collectives Alex Walker & Daniel O’Toole, Ali McCann, Ali Tahayori, Ellen Dahl, Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, Izabela Pluta, Kai Wasikowski, Nathan Beard, Olga Svyatova, Rebecca McCauley & Aaron Claringbold, Sammy Hawker, and Skye Wagner.

more about this exhibition here.

How does a space communicate? What exists in ‘empty’ space? Topographically, a harbour (noun) is a holding space – a body of water protected from the wind, waves and ocean currents that churn beyond; deep enough to allow anchorage. To harbour (verb) is to keep a thought or feeling, especially secretly. Sydney harbour is a holding space of secrets and memories; the residue of its history saturates its bays, banks and depths. 

Processed with water from the harbour, the analogue photographs in this exhibition resonate with the memories that exist within. They tell of the dark violence of colonisation, the dendritic pattern of the harbour’s sunken river valley, the fig trees that line its shores and the icy comets & grains of solar dust that formed the Earth’s oceans. 

The works in this exhibition were created during a 3- month artist residency at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf. The artist would like to acknowledge the Gadigal, Birrabirragal & Cammeraygal people - the Traditional Custodians of the lands & waters that the works in this series were created. 

more about this exhibition here.

It's the middle of Summer in Sydney, but a cool change is sweeping through as visual artist Sammy Hawker sets up a tripod on the blustery harbour foreshore. Atop it, she balances a large-format film camera — Hawker is well-practised at working with the elements.

She sets up her shot, a moody ocean-scape, and pulls a striped towel over her head. With one precise click, she captures the scene on a single slide of negative.

Hawker is known for her experimental photography. She "co-creates" artworks with elements of the natural environment and found materials within it. She has previously encrusted film negatives in honeycomb, used caterpillar remains found in a trough to produce butterfly wing-like forms, and used analogue techniques to give a second life to human ashes.

Her current project, titled [holding] space, seeks to share some of that creative licence with the iconic, chronically over-photographed Sydney Harbour. She collects saltwater from the harbour to help develop the film, which corrodes and marks the negative to compelling effect.

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[excerpt]: 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 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."

With Nature brings together a selection of contemporary Australian artists who have produced works in collaboration with the environment, where the landscape has influenced the outcome of the work, to speak of Earth’s transformation due to our influence. The pandemic demonstrated the power of human collaboration during perilous times, however the unfathomable levels of collaboration at work in the natural environment offers invaluable lessons for contemplation. Featuring a range of artists working in photography, drawing, sculpture and textiles, the exhibition poses the question: how can we collaborate with our natural environment to better understand how to live a sustainable future on this planet?

more about this exhibition here.

[excerpt]:

A chosen artist from the ACT is Sammy Hawker, a freelance videographer and photographic artist who in her short time here has become almost legendary. 

A relative newcomer to Canberra, Hawker studied video art at the Sydney College of the Arts, but moved to Canberra and discovered PhotoAccess – “My spiritual home,” she says. 

“I learnt how to process film and then lockdown happened. I never saw myself as a photographer, but I discovered that film allowed me to experiment.”

She did and has since won a swag of prizes, including the 2022 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and the 2023 Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize.

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Sammy Hawker is a Canberra-based visual artist who collaborates with insects, oceans and rivers to create unique photographs. Most recently she has used beehives as part of her process, letting bees create hive patterns on top of analogue film of landscapes. By inviting in these more-than human forces to interact with the negative, she disrupts her authorial control over the image. Moving beyond just capturing a moment, her photographs can be seen as conversations with landscape.

Canberra artist Sammy Hawker has won the inaugural Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize – but her winning work goes way beyond that of a simple image. Her evocative work, Caterpillars in Metamorphosis, won her the $2000 first prize in the PhotoAccess competition. The judges, visual artist Anna Madeleine Raupach, photographer Chris Round and director of PhotoAccess, Alex Robinson, described her work as an “exceptional blend of concept, process, and execution”.

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Australian Photography Journal
11 jul. 2022

The Australian Photographic Society (APS) has announced Canberra-based photographer Sammy Hawker as the winner of the 2022 Mullins Contemporary Photographic Prize (MACPP) for the work titled Mount Gulaga. 

This year's judging panel included Heide Romano, Alex Wisser and Bill Bachman. Hawker's work was selected as the overall winner from the competition's largest pool of entries yet. This year saw 260 submissions come in from 134 different entrants. As winner, Hawker takes home a $15,000 cash prize and Mount Gulaga will become part of the Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre’s permanent collection of post-war contemporary paintings, ceramics and photography.

The concept statement for Mount Gulaga reads:

"This work was captured on 4x5 film looking out towards Mount Gulaga from the Wallaga Lake headland. I processed the negative with ocean water collected from site. When processing film with salt water, the corrosive properties lift the silver emulsion and the representational image is rendered vague. However, an essence of the site is introduced to the frame as the vibrant matter paints its way onto the negative. A ghost of Gulaga looms behind the abstraction ~ felt rather than seen."

The works of all 30 finalists are now on show at the Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre. The exhibition is open from today and is set to run until 27 August 2022. 

Canberra Critic Circle Award
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sammy Hawker, 2021

Walking on Yuin, Ngarigo, and Ngunnawal Countries, then processing with collected water, soil, bark and flowers, employing pigment inks, emulsions and silver nitrate to create prints humming with the presence of the sites, she created an unsettling and thrilling exhibition, Acts of Co-Creation at Mixing Room.

2021 CANBERRA CRITICS' CIRCLE

FRANK MCKONE • HELEN MUSA • ROB KENNEDY • MEREDITH HINCHLIFFE • TONY MAGEE • ALANNA MACLEAN • JOE WOODWARD • KERRY-ANNE COUSINS CRIS KENNEDY • SAMARA PURNELL • ARNE SJOSTEDT • SIMONE PENKETHMAN • BILL STEPHENS • BRIAN ROPE • CLINTON WHITE • LEN POWER • JOHN LOMBARD PHILLID MACKENZIE • GRAHAM MCDONALD • PETER WILKINS • JANE FREEBURY • IAN MCLEAN • ANNI DOYLE WAWRZYNCZAK • CON BOEKEL • MICHELLE POTTER