Vicky Hawkins Art Online

About

.A student at the Central School during the seventies, later assisting internationally revered artist Bridget Riley between 1974 -1986, Vicky’s early work focuses on the Abstract. Her abstract, unimpeded flow of rich colour clearly delineates Vicky’s early obsessions with spectacle and storytelling in art – two themes that consequently go on to imbue her entire career. During the early eighties, Vicky’s work gradually takes on more figurative references, but a growing obsession with ritual and primitive cultures where materials are often re-used and recycled to create powerful costumes and art soon start to dominate her work.

Born in Bow, raised in the Isle of Dogs and the daughter of a Docker, East London has permeated Vicky’s artwork in all that she has created, as if the Thames itself had been her very lifeblood and throughout the late eighties and nineties, this analogy could not have been stronger. Alluding to the primitive societies that she had become so transfixed by, Vicky became adept at re-using the materials in her own community and started trawling the river’s foreshore for flotsam and jetsam, that she later transformed into spectacular paintings, bespoke jewellery, costumes, tapestries, wall-hangings, sets and sculptures, devising a unique style and body of work that press, clients and galleries alike, largely recognize to be the very colour and bustle of life in London’s East End immortalised artistically.

The last decade has seen Vicky delve into text-based pieces and books, which are immensely decorative aesthetically, but also serves to dispel  proud or haughty themes, usually from the Artist’s own childhood. In particular, the “Memento Mori” series insists on re-aligning perceptions of our own mortality and is characteristic of Vicky’s relentless artistic-evaluations of the past, continual embracing of the present and tireless challenging of the future that we see repeatedly in her work.

Most recently,  a growing fascination with the strange, baleful, eerie power that dolls hold over us has led Vicky to create "Alpha Girls" - a body of work that has inspired Vicky's art to evolve into the medium of short film.  The dolls, 26 in total - each representing a letter of the alphabet where created by Vicky through a series of textile, soft sculptures laid dormant for years, before a move into film brought them to life.

From  "The Alpha Girls", was born the sinister and playful, grotesquely comic "Mutant Babies", crafted in the same way, these  happily-wounded, Shamanic creatures often lacking serious body parts, soon became the next artistic conduit to Vicky's melancholic charm. A collection that has now enjoyed global recognition spearheaded by support from internationally revered artist Richard Wilson, who chose the "Mutant Babies" film to appear  alongside a series of film pieces at the RA's Summer Show - a first for the genre to be included in this way.