Cynthia Hawkins

‘In Chapter 4: Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D #10, we find a form of dimensionality that is curious in the context of Hawkins’ referential abstraction. Dimensionality here appears as modelling, the illusionistic recession of form in perspectival space, if only a pantomime of it. Hawkins based these biomorphs on a photo of an asteroid, and figures the same asteroid in three different aspects. Red, blue, and yellow: they take up enough space that one wants to say they occlude the canvas, as though there were something else to see beneath them. But unlike the inveterate flatness of so many of Hawkins’ shapes, here there is the barest suggestion that the shapes bend into a third dimension.

It’s as if here, at this last moment before leaving the series, Hawkins has wanted us to connect the ways she’s invented to hold her worlds together with those older painting traditions where the ligament is given by perspectival technologies. The suggestion might be that the figurative is not enemy to the abstract, in Hawkins’ ways of reckoning it. That this distinction is not entailed in her tradition of abstraction. Her abstraction is a cosmology. A mesh that is never certain of its coordinates, only its tendencies and its traditions for unlearning and mending. In Hawkins’ ligamental abstraction, there are no enemies, only obstacles, assays, re-assessments, and moving on.’

Kris Cohen, ‘Ligamental, Dimensionality Ununified’, Hollybush Issue 19

‘A journey through Cynthia Hawkins’ work reveals the maturation of a highly individual exploration through the permutations of colour, light, and space in two dimensions. Hawkins has always been intrigued with space – both known and unknown. Her stylistic meanderings always come back to the same essential truth – picturing planar realities on canvas.’

— Thelma Golden

Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting since the 1970s. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined conceit or strategy, Hawkins’ process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemised space for her continually evolving vocabulary. Her early works on canvas used systems of geometry to explore fundamentals of space and space-time to investigate three and four dimensional movement. Concurrently she charted the development of symbolic language through the introduction of sequences of shapes and signs that are, as she has written, ‘strung together [to] imply a sentence or a passage of text’. 

While her work in the late 1990s shifted towards the abstraction of references sourced from the physical world – from the forest floor to microbiological contours and astronomic forms – Hawkins maintains that her ‘practice is abstraction’. Hawkins subverts expectations of figuration as a de-facto-political mode, offering the non-objectivity of her chromatic worlds as a way into painting’s social possibilities. The intertextual relationships between symbols, signs, geometric contours, and calligraphic marks merge into an ecosystem of forms that develop the painterly beyond mere expressionism.