Anna Hawkins

Anna Hawkins, based in Edmonton, Alberta, works mainly in moving images and installation. In residency at Est-Nord-Est, she continued her work on Constellations, a video work based on representation and observation of the cosmos.

The video project’s point of departure was Hawkins’s discovery of the Queen Elizabeth II  Planetarium, in Edmonton’s Coronation Park, and its mosaics depicting the signs of the Zodiac. For several years, she continued to visit different spiritual and enigmatic places and wondered how human beings project into these sites a connection with the celestial universe, in which she sought her own reflection. She therefore went to visit La Ciotat, where the Lumières brothers projected their film for the first time, in an observatory in the French Prealps, and the red carpet in Cannes, where audiences could project themselves as “stars.” So, in Constellations, video captures, images taken in the field, and texts combine to form a nonlinear, open, poetic narrative. The relations between the intermixed images and temporal sequences echo the quest for meaning often behind the design of these unusual places.

In parallel with her work on the video, Hawkins used her stay at Est-Nord-Est to paint a series of watercolours and make works on paper from rubbings. This way, she left the digital environment to occupy the physical space of the studio and at the same time to explore with new ideas. Some of the arrangements In the watercolours might then be transposed into her video, and vice versa. In the drawings and watercolours were faces, a horse’s head, an ear, oranges, a glove, a hand. The compositions of the works on paper echoed the video sequences – the images, the pace, and the way in which the story takes shape, shot by shot.

Hawkins also designed a paper dome to study its shape and potential. Used in planetariums to project images and introduce the public to astronomy, the form of the cupola offers an atypical imaginary framework. She explored how this structure could act as a space for projection and as a surface for her watercolours.