About

Artist Statement

I used to enjoy the process of planning, making lists, setting deadlines, and meeting everyone’s expectations; even though they often fell beneath my own. I relished this system of restriction, it applied to every facet of my life from my sleep, my eating, my thinking, everything. It was just an escape from feeling things intensely, and as an adolescent, everything is felt intensely.

I cannot tell you when the change occurred, but it certainly did. I lost my ability to plan, calculate, and meticulously act. It was the same sensation as falling down a flight of stairs. I became an “intuitive” person, eating chocolate hummus and using spray foam for the hell of it. I stole a dead possum off the side of the road in front of a church on Sunday and saved all of my family members’ baby teeth; without disinfecting them. I collect bones and people gift me dead bugs. I am terrible at drinking water and I’m terrified of being a failure. I hate being idle, but I love sitting in the woods digging in the rocks for hours.

I get inspired by everything, but take what I can like a crow in a junkyard. I collect little fragments of my life and translate them into symbols--I use these symbols throughout my work to communicate these odd sensations and uncomfortable feelings I experience. Body parts, dead birds, bugs, teeth, bones, and my grandmother’s memory. It’s my language, my attempt to understand who I am. I’m interested in trace remnants, the tiny details that make a person utterly absurd, utterly themselves. I want to peel back the skin and take a deep look at everything--and simultaneously I want to stitch my skin so tightly behind the guise of a humorous story so you can’t look any deeper.

I want to explore my discomfort and body in a way that satisfies the itch in my brain and the tightness of my skin. If I could take my skin off like a coat, I would.



BIO
Tiffany Hawkins is an Alabama-based artist, she earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing, and BA in Art History from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is currently earning her MFA in Painting from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.