AJ Hawkins on "Art and Death"

Continuing with our series on “Art and Death”, please enjoy our conversation with artist AJ Hawkins about how changing relationships to faith can change our relationships to grief and grieving processes, how the death of a beloved pet inspired a search to make sense of her own mortality, the necrobiome as a "microbiological afterlife", her project "The Reclamation", How Death Positivity includes issues like bodily autonomy and environmentalism, how art can be used to connect and communicate, and to cope with things that feel "too big", and a crash course on ecological disposition.

AJ Hawkins uses fine art as a research medium to explore the challenges of living in a mortal body. Drawing on her background as a painter, sculptor and custom fabricator, AJ often creates hybrid art works that blur the lines between 2- and 3-dimensional, traditional and experimental.

Her Kickstarter-funded project, The Reclamation, challenges viewers to choose more environmentally-friendly afterlives by highlighting the value of human decomposition and the necrobiome. In years since, AJ's art has focused on experiences surrounding grief and illness. Her new series, The Poisoned Body, explores the physical and psychological toll of living with a prolonged and severe iatrogenic disease.

More Ways of Seeing, More Ways of Creating

Hi everyone! Summer intern Tori here with my penultimate blog post. I can hardly believe how quickly August flew by.

As a current Smith student, I am so excited to share the work of a Smith alum, artist Erika Marie York '12.

York is a painter who was diagnosed with Stargardt during middle school. Stargardt is a disease that causes vision loss. As a visual artist with low vision, York’s bold, bright, abstract style on large canvases was born of her everyday visual perceptions, and her techniques for making creation and viewing more accessible to those with low vision. As she tells us in her recent interview for The Vision and Art Project, “Creating art isn’t only for able-bodied people.” (x) Certainly, art is often influenced by artists’ perceptions of the world, and low vision is another way of seeing and perceiving the world that results in another way of painting it.

This is something York’s work shows us. Shaped by her perceptions of the world as a low-vision artist, her bold abstract style first gained recognition when she was in high school: 

“What I learned in art class in high school was impactful because it taught me that I could do whatever I wanted with art. I learned that my version of a still life was way more abstract then the teacher expected and I was rewarded for that. My version of a still life was different and my high school art teacher encouraged that. I think that’s the best lesson that I learned.”

York’s work and words, which you can read in her interview for The Vision and Art Project, are important and insightful. She shows us that low vision is another way of seeing the world, and so, it is another way to paint it, too. 

You can view York’s work on her Etsy store, ArtfulDiscourse.