Working from a Los Angeles studio, Tim Hawkinson creates conceptual work that includes room-size installations, collages and sculpture and provokes responses from absurd to purely humorous. He makes clocks from Coca-Cola cans or hair brushes or items from a pile of laundry, bird skeletons and nail clippings. One of his pieces, "Ranting Mop Head" (1995) is an upright mop on one side and a machine on the other side that has synthetic voices. When activated, the 'mop head' rants with gibberish. Another work, "Uberorgan", is a 12-pipe organ with expanding and contracting balloons that expand and contract with the markings on a 200-foot piano-player-like scroll. In turn, the balloons send air through the pipes, which play hymns, popular music and "unrecognizable tunes".

In February 2005, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Hawkinson's work. Although it seems clear, according to "The New York Times" reviewer Susan Freudenheim that his sculpture is about process, inventiveness and the 'order of randomness', the artist has no summarizing statement to offer about the meaning of his pieces. He says: "Don't ask me that question because I don't have an answer. It's more like I'm offering the viewer whatever it is that I want to see in a piece."

In March 2005, Hawkinson is overseeing the installation of a 20-foot bear constructed from eight granite boulders. The location is the quadrangle for engineering buildings at the University of California, San Diego. This piece will become part of the Stuart Collection, and is created from an initial purchase by Hawkinson of 200 tons of rocks. Generally Tim Hawkinson works by himself without a studio assistant, but for this project he sought help from campus engineers for the making of models and for the reinforcement design to hold the piece together.

Hawkinson was born in San Francisco and raised near San Jose by an optician father and homemaker mother. From childhood, he was ever making things. In 1984, he and his wife, Patty Wickman, a figurative painter who teaches at UCLA, moved to Los Angeles where for fourteen years, they lived in the downtown studio that he continues to use. The couple moved to Altadena in 1998, and in 2005 are in process of building a back-yard studio so they "can make art closer to home" where they are also raising a toddler daughter.

Source:
Susan Freudenheim, 'A Mop That Talks and Other Creative Liberties', "The New York Times", Sunday, February 13, 2005, AR 17.