Continue playing

(Time remaining: )

Play from beginning

Continue playing "{{ controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].segmentParentTitle}}"

{{controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].title}} has ended.

{{ currentTime | date:'HH:mm:ss':'+0000' }} / {{ totalTime | date:'HH:mm:ss':'+0000' }}

{{ currentTime | date:'mm:ss':'+0000' }} / {{ totalTime | date:'mm:ss':'+0000' }}

Add to watchlist

Remove from watchlist

Video unavailable

Tim Hawkinson in "Time"

September 17, 2003

Tim Hawkinson tinkers with everyday materials to build surprising mechanical art works. “I guess it comes from early on in childhood, a fascination with moving parts and sort of the magical,” he suggests.

In his studio, Hawkinson explains how he used gears, switches, nozzles, buckets, and pie tins to build a drumming machine that captures random drips of rain, amplifies them, and organizes them into music. “It’s not even electronics. I don’t know what it is,” he admits. One of Hawkinson’s largest projects, Überorgan, is an inflatable installation in a space the size of a football field. For a version of the artwork the artists created a score for the organ using old church hymns.

More information

Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian

Translate this video

Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.

Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

(Un)Common Materials Language and Text The Body

Installation Music Sculpture Sound

Being an Artist How It's Made Studio Time

Tim Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. His installation, Überorgan—a stadium-size, fully automated bagpipe—was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. The source of inspiration for many of Hawkinson’s pieces has been the re-imagining of his own body, and what it means to make a self-portrait of this new or fictionalized body. In 1997, the artist created an exacting, two-inch-tall skeleton of a bird from his own fingernail parings; believable even at a close distance, this work reveals Hawkinson’s attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time.

“In my work, I tried to maintain some of that freshness and keep shifting what it is that I’m looking at to see it differently or creating a different process of looking at something that gives me a new kind of interpretation.”

Tim Hawkinson