Mercy Hawkins resides in Sacramento, CA receiving her BA in Studio Art from California State University Sacramento in 2018 with a minor in History. Presently she works at the Before Columbus Foundation in Oakland, CA, a non-profit promoting multicultural literature for fifty years.
Mercy Hawkins’s practice is inspired by a love-of-the-land, natural spaces and the life that inhabits them. Seeking to recreate and reimagine the vital connections between the human world with that of the natural world, the work gently awakens our intuitions in a time of increasing environmental crisis. Her research spans investigations into various human relationships to the natural world, expanding into ethnographic studies on communication, exploring modes of representation, reaching beyond symbolic language. Hawkins seeks to align her audience with the perception that we too are of the earth, ocean and sky. The illusion that we are singular beings is undone with a more welcoming, collective interpretation of a comingled and intertwined existence with all things.
In Hawkins’s thesis project, Invitation to the Marriage of Sea and Grass, the viewer is encouraged to interact directly with the work, walking amidst a garden of stalk paintings growing from the gallery floor. A closer encounter entails a slowing of time where tempos are musically elongated, observing each stitch, dash, and nuanced color within. There is an expansive world even within the smallest details of each piece drawing its own deeper breath. A slow dance is observed in evolution, a choreography of biology turned inside out. Invitation to the Marriage of Sea and Grass is an anticipation to the celebration of what is possible when the imagination is attuned to the green world outside itself.
https://www.mercyhawkins.com
@mercy.hawkins
