Alice Hawkins moves between the worlds of fine art and fashion. This major exhibition of her work included images taken across the last decade as well as specially commissioned new images.
Hawkins’s images are always portraits, and her sitters occupy a vast range of social situations and geographical locations. Some are produced for her fashion world employers, whilst others Hawkins has discovered through her own research. The photographer Nick Knight has described Hawkins’s work as capturing “the everyday burlesque”, the theatrical or outrageous in ‘ordinary’ life.
Hawkins’s photographs include celebrities, the rich and famous, and people who would normally never appear in a fashion photograph whether because of age, appearance, status or geography. Hawkins is led by her own ideas of beauty and glamour, which are often excluded from the space championed by the mainstream media. Hawkins’s role as a photographer has been to expand our understanding of what is desirable or interesting, and to bring new subjects and situations into fashion photography and the main stream.
Installation images from Alice Hawkins All the world is a Stage can be seen here.
The exhibition included a new body of work on Blackpool entertainers. Organised in collaboration with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland.