200 x 100 cm | 78 x 39 in
Subject: Animals
Tags:
Dark,
Animal,
Oil Painting
Original painting in oil on linen.
There’s a flicker between “Devourer” and “Devour Her” - a psychic ambiguity encoded in the parenthesis. It poses a core question: who holds the appetite? And deeper still: is the feminine being consumed or revealed through the act of consumption?
This ambiguity is not a flaw; it’s the hinge. The painting, like a dream, doesn’t resolve it. It compels us to stay in the tension.
The wolf here isn’t mythologised - it’s real - stalks, glints, looks out from a shadow that’s been waiting.
It may be her daemon or her self.
Hawkins is interested in the Feminine Sublime - traditionally, the sublime (in the Kantian/Burkean frame) is linked with the vast, the terrible, the overwhelming - coded as masculine: mountains, storms, power. The feminine sublime (as explored by theorists like Barbara Freeman and Bracha Ettinger) is subtler, darker, internal. Overwhelms not with scale, but with intensity. Entrances. Entangles. Devours.
This painting walks that line. There’s no landscape or sky only fur, shadow, hunger, and gleam. It is both the predator and the field of encounter. It is the sublime - and she’s in it.
In Jungian terms, this could be an image of the shadow self, not as threat, but as power. What has been split off - devouring rage, erotic instinct, sovereignty - has re-entered the room. To devour is to integrate. To be devoured is to surrender form.
This painting asks: What happens when the feminine refuses to stay edible?
Or worse (or better): What if she’s the one with the teeth?
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