MICHAEL HAWKSWORTH

Michael Hawksworth is a Hawke’s Bay-based painter and printmaker whose work blurs the boundary between abstraction and narrative. His visual language is one of fragments, half-glimpsed figures, and constructed spaces that hover somewhere between memory, imagination, and science fiction.

A graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts (University of Auckland), Hawksworth has exhibited widely across Aotearoa. His practice draws on both popular culture and speculative fiction — what he calls the “hard-SF end of painting” — where the emotional terrain of disaster, survival, and regeneration becomes material for painterly exploration.

Working in acrylic, ink, and mixed media, Hawksworth layers line and tone to create worlds that feel at once architectural and human. His recent series Exhaust continue his long-running investigation into technology, vulnerability, and the psychology of systems under pressure.

Hawksworth’s paintings and drawings have featured in exhibitions throughout New Zealand. Whether depicting a machine-like landscape or a solitary figure suspended in light, his work reflects an ongoing fascination with how people — and structures — adapt to disruption.