In Disfigures Sequence, Richard Hawkins merges the brooding tenderness of John Grant’s 2023 cover of Nick Drake’s ‘When the Day Is Done’ (1969) with a shifting visual collage that explores the human effort to locate meaning amid cultural cycles of decay and regeneration. Set to Grant’s slow, mournful rendition, the video becomes a melancholic meditation on the passage of time, the fragility of identity, and the haunting persistence of cultural memory. While the grotesque and abject figure heavily in Hawkins’ work, Disfigures Sequence offers a moment of respite within that logic. While unsettling and uncanny, the fragments of historical images and dream-like digital manipulations that pulse and fade across the screen, are modelled after a certain longing for canonized beauty. They appear like echoes of past lives lost, regained, and distorted. In tandem with the imagery evoked in the song, these visuals evoke a sense of finality, collapsing victory and failure into the same dusk-hued space. The music renders the bodies in Hawkins’ sequence not just as bodies, but as icons of exhausted effort, each one bearing the weight of a race run too soon, hopes dashed, and meaning obscured.

As the song progresses, the faces increasingly blur, limbs repeat, and forms cycle through endless configurations. The song’s personal reflections on struggle and starting again finds poignant resonance here, as the video portrays culture not as progress necessarily, but as a recursive loop—of striving, failing, and re-emerging. Displacement is palpable; figures drift without roots or destination, yet amid the disfigurement, there is beauty and an eerie quietude that gives space for reflection. Disfigures Sequence reveals not just the breakdown of form, but also its continual remaking. The fact that the song is a 2023 remake of a 1969 original is significant. Are we at the end of history? Have we lost the ability to produce something wholly new despite our technological efforts and progress? In this tension between loss and recurrence, Hawkins crafts a visual elegy: a spectral space where the human figure labours, collapses, and reconstitutes itself again and again, within the vast machinery of time and culture. We want to make sense of the now, but more importantly we strive to find ways to contribute to its culture.

Read Bradford Nordeen's review of The Garden of Loved Ones’ at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong in 2025 where this artwork was exhibited.