Judith Kreps Hawkins - CV

Judith’s artistic career has been relatively brief, but her exposure to the arts began over a half-century ago in tiny seaside villages in the southwest of England, where her father made his living as a creative photographer. Before she turned to the arts herself, she studied nursing at Bart's Hospital in London, then midwifery at the Radcliffe in Oxford. She immigrated to Montreal in 1965 and raised a family there while nursing in Lachine. In the mid-1990s, she completed a fine arts degree with distinction at Concordia University, where she was allowed to break all the rules. She then re-settled in Northumberland County.

Judith's studio in Port Hope is a small cottage overlooking the Lake Ontario shoreline. It contains a huge variety of “art supplies” - boxes of small springs, antique blue flashbulbs, shimmering ribbons of cloth, dried seed pods, dozens of colours of nail polish, bags of bones and debris found on the beach. About 10 years ago, another student called Judith “a bag lady with a fertile imagination”, and she may have had a point. She has made her home in big cities, and in sparsely settled moors; she has studied the human race through careful drawings of the unadorned body, and in the urgent and highly technological realm of hospitals. Perhaps that is why, in her multimedia sculptures, there is no line between the “natural” and the “artificial”. "At some level," she says, "everything we see around us is a result of imagination, and what could be more natural than imagination?"

Judith has works in private collections in Canada, the USA and England. She has exhibited in a variety of solo and group shows in Montreal, Toronto, Belleville, Port Perry and in Northumberland County, and has been a member of the Colborne Art Gallery for 10 years. For the same length of time she has had work in each of the annual juried shows at the Art Gallery of Northumberland, as well as others in Ontario.