Camille Hawbaker Voorhees
Camille Hawbaker Voorhees
Camille Hawbaker is an emerging artist working in print and fiber media. Her artistic process began with drawing during childhood, and her skills have grown to include traditional “craft” practices like printmaking, weaving, dyeing, papermaking, and bookmaking. Her experiences from living in different cities in the central United States and travels abroad have also informed her artistic practice. Her nomadic past revealed to her how moving from one city to another can drastically change individual and collective identity, which she senses through language. Through her travels she began to see how much of what is known and believed is formed by circumstance, and her desire for connection with herself and others was both strengthened and hampered by these irreconcilable similarities. She currently lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska.
Words are living, growing, and evolving concepts in the topography of human communication. Words construct my perception of the world: brimming with meaning, sometimes they are placed in the wrong context, and sometimes they are so overused that they lose their original connotation. Over time, perception erodes personal language and its insufficiencies are revealed. I write to convey desires, observations, and emotions in personal journals. Yet, as my perception evolves, I sense that the words I write do not express my actual thoughts: they can only become fragments of what I wish to communicate. To express this totality that escapes representation, I use processes of drawing, writing with flammable liquid, burning, printing, and sewing to construct a tactile vocabulary with natural forms and decorative motifs. I create, destroy, and reconstruct to echo the act of journaling without the baggage of existing imperfect language.
