Artist Center: Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. Some his work, such as Uberorgan (Pictured below) is a stadium- sized fully automated bagpipe. This work was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. This kind of work is what makes Hawkinson a fine artist, his ability to take objects we wouldn’t think of using, and blow away our minds with them.

Hawkinson not only has a fascination with creating giant sculptures and using un-thought of materials, but also with music. A lot of his work is revolved around music, such as with Uberorgan and another work called Pentecost. Hawkinson has a lot of reoccurring themes in his work such as music and their physical size, but a lot of his work is an extension of the body. In his works, you can begin to pick out and recognize different items in his work. Some of his works contain organs, such as with Uberorgan, and others intestines and other parts of the body. Some of his works, mostly his self-portraits, contain the physical body, but morphed or altered in some way.

A lot of the inspirations for most of Hawkinson’s pieces have been the re-imaging of his own body and what it means to make a self-portrait of his new or fictionalized body. His works reveal his attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and passage of time. Hawkinson’s works let us see the human body being portrayed in different ways, and even though the body is not in most of his works, we can still sense that they are a part of it somehow. Tim Hawkinson’s use of the human body and how he manipulates it is the main focus of his works, and what makes him one of the greatest artists of the twenty-first century.