Jeremy Hawkes

Jeremy Hawkes is a professional Australian artist, advocate, writer and sometime performer with over 25 years’ experience. Trained initially as a sculptor, he has a BA in Fine Arts (SCU) and post-graduate qualifications from RMIT and VCA. He currently resides in regional New South Wales.

Since 2007 he has identified as an artist with disability, when a work place accident revealed that he lives with acute degenerative disc disease, polyarthritis and advanced osteosclerosis. Further diagnoses and treatments followed including early-onset Parkinsons and complex regional pain syndrome. This proved to a turning point in his life and professional practice.

Jeremy’s work utilises drawing, painting, sculpture, digital imaging and performance. He is a published writer, was a featured artist in ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ a collaborative film project with HW Collective which explored his creative response to chronic illness funded by Screenworks and ABC open.  Prolific and engaged across many media, Jeremy has been successful in acquiring funding and facilitating community-based projects, working primarily with artists with disability.

He has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards including Create NSW Professional Development with the Epicormia Collective 2015, Australia Council for the Arts Community & Cultural Development 2016, Australia Council for the Arts Artist with Disability Mentorship Award 5019/20. He is currently fulfilling a Create NSW Fellowship by attending a 5-month residency in New York and Berlin. He has also been the guest judge for a number of awards including the MS Art Prize and Connected 2014/15. He has exhibited extensively in both Australia and overseas with an exhibition at Lone Goat gallery, Byron Bay in 2018, a forthcoming solo rehibition at the Berlin Art Institute (October 2019) and a solo exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery (July 2020).

In 2020 Jeremy will be collaborating with renowned UK artist Rachel Gadsden with possible outcomes in the UK and Australia.

His current work explores the body as a site of identity and pathology, architecture and technologies. Deeply personal but exploring universal ideas of what it means to be human, to feel pain, to be an organism caught in the act of evolution, responding through contingency to circumstances.

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