Face the Music, recent works by artist Mercy Hawkins, features a collection of large watercolor paintings on paper, alongside a series of hybrid sculptural paintings in a multitude of displays. With this work, Hawkins seeks to answer the internal call, to encounter what the body already knows. An excavation of the epicenter of our own inner rhythms, heartbeat, breath, a dancing of wild arms, to reestablish that longtime connection to the musical lattice of the natural world. The work seeks to ground the human sensorium in the multitude of intelligences that flourish and grow from and with the earth. Recalling the lyric from the popular song, “Let’s face the music and dance…before the fiddlers have fled” the artist heeds the dire warning of a planet in crisis. While the crisis is long past the call for dance as a solution, the action of being in step with the natural world, a gesture of syncopation that returns us to the rapture of a truly embodied existence, is offered as a new beginning. The artist hopes to communicate this rhythmic, intuitive experience of generous looking and sensory observation through the work. Breathing with tides, swimming through grass, a circling of the sun, to share an understanding that nature is the expansion of thought itself and we are an integral part in that creation.
About Mercy Hawkins:
Mercy Hawkins is a mixed-media artist who received her BA in Studio Art from California State University, Sacramento, and her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis. She has exhibited her work across California, including at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and at the UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. A recipient of multiple awards, she recently completed a graduate fellowship residency at The Headlands Center for the Arts. Hawkins currently teaches art at UC Davis and California State University, Sacramento.
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