Tongues In Trees
April 5 - 16, 2022
Special Reception: April 8th, 5-7pm with an Artist talk at 6pm!
Strata Gallery presents its fourth Emerging Member solo exhibition Tongues In Trees by California-based artist Mercy Hawkins. This exhibition opens April 5, 2022, with a special reception on Friday, April 8th from 5-7pm.
Mercy Hawkins’ work seeks to reveal a new language, expanding a lexicon of the possible, as it relates to the sensorium of the living body, both in and as the natural world. Working within a craft-based manipulation and assemblage of varied materials, Hawkins pursues a return to a vital visual language, imbued with a living, responsive pulse of the world. Hawkins seeks to create work that is at once uncanny and unsettlingly alive. Creating forms and images of what we might encounter if language could return to its pre-literate origins, an experience potentially weaving our bodies with the land.
Hawkins says of her work “I think of the creation of art like music through an instrument. I process the world around me through my body and invite my viewers to participate in a slow dance with the work. I seek to retune the senses and recenter ourselves to reencounter questions such as where are we really, in relation to ourselves, each other, and the cosmos.”
Hawkins received her BA in from California State University, Sacramento with a minor in History and received her MFA from University of California, Davis in 2021. Presently she works at the Before Columbus Foundation in Oakland, CA, administrator of the American Book Award. She is currently a graduate fellow in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito CA and is featured in New American Paintings #153, MFA Annual.
Artist Statement:
Mercy Hawkins is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Northern California. Her work investigates language, expanding the lexicon as it relates to the sensing body within the natural world. Working within a craft-based manipulation of materials she seeks a return to a visual language invested and participatory with the living, gesturing world.
In her current body of work hybrid sculptural paintings are paired with large ink drawings. Sculptures are subtilty figurative yet still alien. Color parades the surface in beats and pulses like the systole and diastole of our heart. Fragile fraying fibers float suspended between limbs like wind and breath that never ceases its embrace. Drawings are comprised of a cacophony of mark making utilizing accumulation and repetition; building on patterns cellular galaxies open and reveal.
She seeks to create work unsettlingly alive, uncanny, an image of what we might encounter if language returned to its pre-phonetic origins, a deeply tied experience of our bodies with and in the land. Like music through an instrument, the artist invites the viewer to a slow dance, a retuning of the senses and a recentering, to re-ask questions like where are we really?
Hawkins received her BA in from California State University, Sacramento with a minor in History and received her MFA from University of California, Davis in 2021. Presently she works at the Before Columbus Foundation in Oakland, CA, a non-profit promoting multicultural literature for fifty years. She is currently a graduate fellow in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito CA and is featured in New American Paintings #153, MFA Annual.
Mercy Hawkins, The Grass Harp, mixed media on yupo paper, fiber, dimensions variable, 2021, installation view