In Redon Spider Sequence, Richard Hawkins blends 19th-century symbolism, avant-garde dance, and digital glitch to conjure a disquieting meditation on monstrosity, transformation, and affect. Structured like a fractured visual lecture or animated slide show, the video sifts through layers of visual media before locking in on key motifs that begin to twitch, mutate, and animate with awkward, AI-generated momentum. The sound design mirrors this instability in its chaotic, glitchy, and unsettling way, undermining any sense of narrative coherence with a jarring sonic unease.

The central visual anchor is Odilon Redon’s The Crying Spider (1881), an emotionally charged, surreal figure whose human face, marked by an ambiguous sadness, emerges from the unsettling form of a spider. Hawkins extrapolates from this motif, sourced from a magazine cut-out, embedding it into motion-driven collage sequences where other references collide: a monstrous Picasso-like figure morphs and births a Butoh dancer, whose own distorted form slips between frames, genres, and historical registers.

This grotesque recombination pays homage not only to Redon’s poetic ‘noirs’—his charcoal dream-visions of floating monsters and emotive hybrids—but also to Butoh’s slow, painful gestural vocabulary. Emerging in post-war Japan as a rejection of both traditional Japanese dance and Western modernism, Butoh prioritizes stillness, transformation, and embodied trauma. Hawkins reanimates this spirit digitally, where movement is never quite human, and time is perpetually suspended or in transition.

By intersecting Redon’s introspective monsters with the expressive, shape-shifting form of Butoh and the fractured aesthetic of digital collage, Redon Spider Sequence invites viewers into a liminal dream space. It is a world of eerie empathy, where grotesque forms weep, dance, and flicker into life. The result is not a horror of the monstrous, but a strangely moving encounter with beings that fully display and reveal their feelings despite, or perhaps because of, their fractured, nonhuman forms.

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