Jamie Hawkesworth: The British Isles

Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce The British Isles, a new solo exhibition by London-based photographer Jamie Hawkesworth. This exhibition will be the first public presentation of Hawkesworth’s thirteen-year project documenting the landscape, architecture and inhabitants of his home country. A celebration of people and place, The British Isles is imbued with Hawkesworth’s generous and dignifying eye.

The exhibition, and Hawkesworth’s wider project, provides an alternative history of Britain from 2007 to 2020. This eventful period – punctuated by elections, referendums, conflict, and a pandemic – is reframed through the language of the everyday. We see school children, desolate beaches and suburban sheds, each treated with the same sense of curiosity and generosity, prompting a reflection upon what contemporary Britain is and should be.

The works in the exhibition are uniformly titled – all simply called ‘The British Isles’ – so as not to reveal when or where each image was made. For Hawkesworth, the details of place and time are incidental to the image; removing them works to reconstruct his own experience of making this body of work, as the series grew in non-linear and circumstantial ways. Surprising compositions and golden hues generate an otherworldliness, owing in part to the artist’s process; preferring the slower, more tactile approach of analogue photography, Hawkesworth shoots exclusively on film and meticulously develops his own prints. Attuned to the normality of everyday life,

Hawkesworth reframes the familiar as a dreamworld, recasting his subjects as its inhabitants in a radically democratising way.



Jamie Hawkesworth
Hawkesworth was born in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1987. Initially introduced to photography as part of his forensic science degree, he then switched to study the medium, graduating from the University of Lancashire in 2009 with a BA in Photography. Hawkesworth’s Preston Bus Station was published in 2017; On Keeping a Notebook in 2019; and The British Isles in 2021. In 2018 he received the Award for Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography from the Royal Photographic Society. He has worked on editorial campaigns, catalogues and commissions for Alexander McQueen, J.W.Anderson and Loewe, amongst many others. His documentary works have been exhibited in London, Amsterdam and New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. Hawkesworth lives and works in London.
www.jamiehawkesworth.co.uk