“I know so little of the great world in and around me. But I want to find words and ideas that have never occurred before.”
     That’s a grand challenge. And, as it turned out, it took fifty years of living before Judith Kreps Hawkins was ready to begin her artistic search. But over the past dozen years she has created a startling body of work.
     Judith was born in 1941 in southwestern England. Her childhood years were spent in small seaside villages, in the coves, on the beaches, and on the wind-swept moors. But even in those years, she studied art with a contemporary master — her father, noted photographer G.L. Hawkins.
     He helped her to see the beauty in the scenes, big and small, that they witnessed every day. Equally important, as an avid student of chemistry, he developed his own photo-developing processes, and used them to great success, demonstrating to the world, and to his daughter, that sometimes an artist wants to create new tools in order to create new pictures.
     Judith’s adult years began with nursing studies in London, followed by emigration to Canada in 1965. She spent the next 25 years working in Montreal hospitals, while also raising two children as a single parent. It was only in the early 1990’s that she decided to make her interest in art more than a casual hobby, and she enrolled in the fine arts program at Concordia University. After she finished this program, in 1996, she also decided to leave her nursing career behind, move to Ontario, find a home with a good studio space, and work full time in her art.
     In the ensuing years, she has lived in Warkworth, Colborne, and now Port Hope, Ontario. She has been an active member, at various times, of Gallery 121 in Belleville, the Colborne Art Gallery, and Spirit of the Hills (the Northumberland Hills Arts Association). Her work has also been accepted for juried art shows at the Northumberland Art Gallery in each of the past several years.
     Through these shows, area viewers have come to expect the unexpected from Judith’s work. Early in her career, she found that the most common tools and materials — paintbrushes, canvas, oils and pastels — were of little use in expressing what she wanted to express. Her tools of choice became … sandblasters, blowtorches, ovens, glue guns, and the high-tech wonder, a Dremel. She found materials everywhere: old books, discarded shot-gun shells, bones, chairs. A series of works, created over several years, involved forming bread dough in and around incongrous objects, letting the dough rise, and baking it.
     There was a series of books, reworked into wild and sometimes barely recognizable forms, followed by a series of lamps, and a series of chairs. Her gardens proved a fertile source of inspiration, and many of her recent pieces have been built from hollowed and preserved squash and gourds.
     Each of these works presented their own technical challenges. How does one securely fasten a brass zipper to the shell of a Hubbard squash? That’s not in the manual.
     But when the technical challenges are faced, something strikingly new can emerge. Judith’s works are sometimes beautiful, sometimes scary, sometimes funny. Have any of these ideas actually taken shape somewhere before? That’s hard to say for sure. After all, it’s a great world, inside and out.