Skyelar Hawkins Photography

Current Project

The Tales of Mistress Goat Delilah

This is an allegory about discovering and creating, through the written word and photography, a fantastical environment where the characters act out their world to me, the photographer.  This was inspired and created two summers ago when my mother was in the hospital for three months. Traveling six hours on the interstate every weekend I would pass an old abandoned farm that had a decaying school house, church, motel and craft store on the land. Consistently passing this every five days, I started to create a fairytale about the farm and the creatures who inhabit it.

Visually this allegory tells a story made from abstract, ironies and vulnerable, delicate experiences in life that affect us subconsciously. It deals with issues of death, abandonment, intrusion and ownership.  Encounters with each character discovering my presence represent my angst and struggle with my experiences photographing worlds where I’m seen as the intruder with the lens. In the roll as creator vs. voyeur I have created conflict and tension in approaching the character development. Every time I photograph these characters I discover something new about them. As the photographer I become a character they respond too and I am living their story as well.

Frances Skyelar Hawkins 03/07

Click here to go to the photographs for the current show.