Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson is an American sculptor and artist who was born in 1960 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from San Jose State University in 1984 and later earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1989. His parents were antiques dealers and he grew up during the rise of post-modern art. When he was younger he would play with old pieces of equipment and would even built his own toys. Hawkinson uses common materials (plastic bags, used socks) and even discarded organic material (fingernails) from his own body to make complex sculptural systems. His inspiration for his artwork is often the re-imagining of his own body. His installation Überorgan (2001) was a fully automated, stadium-sized bagpipe pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting.

"For Überorgan, I felt that I was going to have a real strong physical presence, but I felt like it needed to also have this kind of audible component. They look like these kind of whales suspended in the air and hovering above them..."

            Hawkinson also made a two-inch tall sculpture of a bird’s skeleton from his own fingernail parings (1997) which show his attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time.