SAMMY HAWKER

Cymatics (from Ancient Greek: κῦμα for 'wave') is the study of making sound and vibration visible. I have recently been working with Australian designer Sam Tomkins to develop a series of analogue cymatic instruments which reveals the shape of sounds.

Relevant exhibitions:

• Sound-Forms: Whale Song | Hervey Bay Regional Gallery (2026)

• Worlds Around Us | Tweed Regional Gallery [2025]

• Ghosts & Monsters | Messums West [2025]

Using whale song recordings made by Mark Franklin of The Oceania Project, Hawker collaborated with designer Sam Tomkins to develop a cymatic instrument that creates moving images from whale song vibrations. The video work and still images taken from it are mesmerising. Like apparitions, they shiver into being, only to disperse and re-form in response to the accompanying soundscape.

Artist Profile [Review of ‘Worlds Around Us’]
Emma Walker, 2025

The song of a Pied butcherbird was recorded early one morning while on residency at The Corridor Project (Wiradjuri Country - NSW, Australia).

Drawing on 18th-century experiments by physicist Ernst Chladni, the eight central notes of the Pied butcherbird’s melody (two of which are repearted) were played into a Chladni plate co-designed by Sam Tomkins. This Chladni plate oscillates salt on a metal plate to form geometric shapes from sound vibrations.

This work was presented in Ghosts & Monsters: Symbiosis and Interspecies Dialogue - a 2025 solo exhibition in the Messums West 13th Century tithe barn (Wiltshire, UK). The song of the Pied butcherbird echoed through the ancient barn and the cymatic figures generated from the songbird's melody were presented as a series of etchings. The cymatic figure of D# - the harmonic minor key of the bird’s melody - was sketched in salt on a 12ft sq steel plate, slowly corroding into a new artwork during the course of the 7-week show. At the close of the show this plate was archived as a giant print - transforming sound, atmosphere and energetic residue into material form.

This exhibition translates the sonic vibration from Pied butcherbird song into physical mark. Emerging from Hawker’s research into sound, vibration and energy, these works transform the ephemeral into form – visualising resonance, frequency and the hidden geometries of the natural world.

Ghosts & Monsters, 2025 | Messums West
Gabriele Taraseviciute