Artist Statement
An artwork can be anything, or whatever thing a viewer, or participant is willing for it to be. The language of art, and how each individual viewer or participant applies this enables a work to communicate. Whilst anyone can participate, art, just like any other discipline has its own specific dialects and dialogues. Sometimes these are exclusive to art, and sometimes they are not. A conversation with an artwork is no ordinary conversation. It is like speaking to oneself as past experiences and attitudes are invariably reflected back in the work. This can be an unpredictable exchange.
As the artist I am undertaking a continuous dialogue with the work, both during its making and after its completion, it is a product of my experiences and investigations over time. In Tasmania, far away from global artistic epicentres I can invent my own dialect and present localised interpretations only achievable in this particular context.
I like my work to have ambivalence in the world: to be in between existence and oblivion or what is there and what is not there or what is three dimensional and what is two dimensional or more appropriately what is representation and what is abstraction.
David Hawley
July 2008