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 MFA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I approach my work as a palimpsest of experience, a living archive that records the traces of time, touch and memory on the surface. I manifest this through a color palette and surface treatment evocative of the skin, a permeable organ that mediates experience through social, cultural, and physical contact. Skin is never static; it is always growing, stretching, wounding, and healing as it evolves with us. It is our most familiar substance, yet when removed from the parameters of the body, it becomes a complex site of intimacy or estrangement. This evolving inquiry extends across both paint and ceramics, using material processes to echo the ways experience accumulates upon the body.

The processes of oil painting and ceramics inherently hold the traces of time, touch, pressure, and revision. These materials act as stand-ins for skin and the body, offering surfaces that can be impressed upon, repaired, or rewritten. In painting, I begin with text, drawings and swaths of paint that later reveal their fragmentary nature through the final surface. I apply large layers of skin-toned color, continually tweaking and adjusting forms with each layer. This process results in large paintings that are layered, nebulous, and spacious, incorporating elements of imagery, abstraction, and illegible text. In ceramics, I carve, press, and imprint forms so that the clay retains a memory of every gesture. Through firing and glazing, each piece undergoes the transformations that mirror those of the body through time. After leaving the kiln, I coat each vessel with layers of encaustic medium, pastel, and paint, further cultivating its history through material process and revision. Across these mediums, I play with reveal and conceal, deciding what details should rise to the surface and what should fade into the background. In tandem with our bodies, my works bear a history of accumulation. By framing my work as skin-like palimpsests, or historically layered documents, I explore what it means to inhabit a body that is both material and mortal in a society that is discomforted by change, transformation, and history.