Photography (MA)
Godith Hawkins
Godith Hawkins is an artist working with Photography. She received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Practice (First Class) from the University of Brighton in 2018. Upon the Completion of her BA, she was nominated for the CVAN (Contemporary Visual Arts Network) south east, Platform Graduate Award by the De La Warr Pavilion. She is also an editor of the publication Fall Into Place RCA (2020). Recent exhibitions include: The Platform Graduate Award, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2019); No Man's Land, Solaris Print, St. Leonards (2018), and, In Dreams, St Mary's in the Castle, The Crypt, Hastings (2018).
My practice de-constructs and re-enacts photographs from forensic and familial archives that relate to a specific encounter. By going beyond the initial reading of a photograph and often taking on a performative role, the work engages with acts of re-enactment and memory; the multiplicity of the ideas we hold and what is then remembered, anticipated and imagined. The works investigate the fragmentary, the duplicate, and how such impacts on our relationship with the original archival image. Context becomes narrative, returning the eye to something hidden or potentially overlooked. Extracted from the original source, the work reveals an instability. Challenging the notion of the neutral photograph, as being reliable, the act of intervention becomes a form of measurement; a means to attempt to understand. Contending with ideas of affect, surface, touch, and pose, the work seeks to inhabit a space between subject and object. Posturing to be something else it misleads, sending the original adrift, making the notion of truth porous.
(Above) Handkerchief used for strangulation - Forensic photograph taken by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss in 1907.
(Left) Edmund - Cropped photograph of my great-great-uncle Edmund Arthur Hawkins on his wedding day, taken in Belgium on 17th November 1944.
