Artist Statement & Bio

BIO

Tiffany Hawkins (She/Her) 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 MA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work approaches skin as a palimpsest of experience, a living archive that records the traces of time, touch and experience upon the surface. Skin is a permeable organ that mediates our experiences through social, cultural, and physical contact. Skin is never static as it is always growing, stretching, wounding, and healing as it evolves with us. Skin is the most familiar substance, yet when distorted from the parameters of the body, it becomes a complex site of intimacy or estrangement. This evolving inquiry extends across paint, ceramics, and papermaking, utilizing material processes to echo the ways in which experience accumulates upon the body.

Paint, clay, and paper each hold traces of touch, pressure, and revision. These materials become stand-ins for skin as they are surfaces that can be impressed upon, repaired, abraded, or rewritten. In paint, I begin with large swaths of skin-toned color, layering transparent oil paint to replicate its natural translucency and tactility. In ceramics, I carve, press, and imprint forms so that the clay holds a memory of every gesture. Through firings and glazes, the piece undergoes the transformations that mirror the transformations of the body through time. In papermaking, pulp becomes a site where the fibers bind, layer, and scar like healing tissue. Processes like blowout and pulp painting both efface and inscribe, leaving behind traces that morph through drying. Across these mediums, I play with reveal and conceal, navigating what should rise to the surface, and asking what should fade into the background. In tandem to our bodies, my works bear a history of accumulation. Thus, by treating skin as a layered document, an imperfect record continually revised, I explore what it means to inhabit a body that is both material and mortal in a society that is averse to discomfort.