Rebecca Hawkes is from a farm near Methven. She usually paints in oils and writes poems about flesh industries, human beastliness, and irrepressible weeds. Rebecca’s first chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ was published in 2019 in AUP New Poets 5. You can find her art and writing online at her vanity mirror rebeccahawkesart.com or in publications like Min-a-rets, Starling, Sport, Scum, and Stasis. She co-edits the journal Sweet Mammalian and is a member of popstar poets’ collective Show Ponies.
Rebecca writes: ‘This painting contains a pomegranate banquet, a crystal chalice, a murex shell’s glossy mouth. It’s got travertine terraces and anemone stinkhorns, a whipped cream and strawberry pav, and a thirsty lamb with an almost predatory aspect. Who laid the table? Who hexed the moon? The painting is not taking further questions. I’m not a practised digital artist and approached this much as I would an oil painting — by layering lurid coloured glazes and swearing at mistakes I’d built into the composition but now felt committed to. The shift from oil pigments to pixels was surprisingly smooth. The painting grew organically from images I was briefly obsessed with, all coalescing into this spooky scene titled ‘creamy geology’.’