Sammy Hawker - news go here
Sammy Hawker is an Australian-based visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country [Canberra Region, ACT]. Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation) Sammy’s works explore the potential of interspecies dialogue, giving voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works raise questions about how sentience and memory is inscribed within materials, sites and bodies. Sammy’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces text, sculpture, photography, sound and moving image. These works form a vast and ongoing archive, documenting sites and moments of exchange. ARTIST PROFILE: HERE | Sammy Hawker website HERE
EXHIBITION - Ghosts [& Monsters]
Messums West | 11 Oct - 1st Dec 2025 - find out more here
Messums Org is proud to present an exhibition from Australian artist Sammy Hawker for the first time in the UK at Messums West in Wiltshire. ‘Ghosts and Monsters’ is an exhibition of works created by Hawker on-site at the Corridor Project – an artist residency programme on Wiradjuri Country, New South Wales, Australia, which invites a diverse selection of creative minds to spend time on country and thus explore different ways of understanding our entwined relationship with nature. Messums Org is delighted to partner with The Corridor Project, a not for profit, regional arts and cultural organisation dedicated to supporting creativity, collaboration, and connection located on Wiradjuri Country in the Central West of NSW, Australia. TCP and MESSUMS Creative [UK] partnered in early 2024 to develop an international artist-in-residency exchange program focused on creative expression, peer-to-peer exchange, and environmentalism.
The works on display in Messums West are research-led, aiming to expand our ways of understanding how communication occurs through the senses. The central work distils the morning song of the pied butcherbird down to its eight repeated notes. This wonderful melody will fill the magnificent tithe barn through the dark months of Autumn and Winter. But the aural sense is not the only way to experience the sound. Using techniques first discovered in 18th Century Germany by scientist and musician Ernest Chladni (described as the grandfather of acoustics), Hawker converts the notes into two-dimensional forms – a visual language that speaks to the eyes not the ears – introducing the thought of unseen geometry flying through space. Hawker has also developed performance works on this theme and, for this exhibition, will produce a colossal print based on the butcherbird’s song, using a sheet of iron covered with salt that will eat into its surface, creating grooves that will be translated in negative onto paper.
Hawker’s practice is in many ways a form of scientific investigation, visually exploring natural phenomena. She describes her works as ‘co-creations’, made in a kind of collaboration with spiders, snakes, insects and birds, for example, primarily in her native Australia. Hawker initially trained as a photographer, and much of the work in the exhibition incorporates photography and photographic processes.
All images above copyright: MESSUMS | WEST - Exhibition Ghosts [& Monsters] - Sammy Hawker - October 2025
ARTIST RESIDENCY
Messums Creative | September October 2025 - find out more here
In partnership with the Corridor Project a not-for-profit Australian multidisciplinary arts and cultural organisation, we are supporting photographer Sammy Hawker through a UK based residency. Her research and work will explore near and long term changes to landscape and environment, anthropocentric living and migration choices and the resonances of the past. The printed publication/ film/digital media artwork created will be shown and stored in the “library” at Lowestoft, forming a foundation brick in the knowledge and research into the area and the community.
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