Celebrating Townsville Exhibition - The Artists

This sculpture is a work the artist made in 1990 and is part of a series of five works. The series was based on poses that were taken from selected figures in British painter Euan Uglow's paintings. The artist selected the poses that best showed the aspects of the personalities that she was looking at representing. This work titled Recognition was the first executed in the series. This sculpture is based on the shadow, which is one of the Jungian archetypes that Hawkins was looking at in relation to personality types. The shadow represents the persona (Meaning: the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others).

Hawkins has stated “The sculpture represents the opposite of what people see me as. That’s why I chose the standing figure with arms behind the back looking confident, which is not how I usually see myself.”

The dark colour that the artist chose for the sculpture relates to the idea of the shadow but is also opposite to the artist’s fair complexion.

Technique

All five figures in the initial exhibition (that this sculpture was part of) were life-size figures and all were made of clay. Clay was initially sculpted over a steel frame. A plaster mould was then made over this that resembled a 3D jig saw of about 30 interlocking pieces.
The artist then pressed clay into the mould to make a cast and joined the pieces together to end up with a whole hollow figure made out of clay. The artist then built a kiln around the figure and fired it over a 24 hour period. The fired ceramic sculpture was initially painted with a red oxide colour with added patches of gold leaf and then black paint over the top of that. The artist then rubbed some parts back to reveal the under-layers of red and the gold. Even though the work looks like bronze it is quite fragile because of the choice of materials.

After this body of work was complete the artist went on to produce a number of figurative sculptures in bronze. These include “Prometheus”, a sculpture in the JCU Eddie Koiki Mabo library, as well as the life-size figure of Robert Towns located in the Townsville CBD on the banks of the Ross River near the old Victoria Bridge.