Kate Hawkins's artistic practice explores the performance of painting and the social performance and rituals in everyday experience. The display of her work is as important as the canvas itself. In her work Mary the canvas sits on top of a tripod-like structure, alluding to methods of photography and framing. Her work is theatrical, playful and humorous at the same time as notions of sincerity and theatrical artifice.

Kate Hawkins studied Fine Art at Edinburgh University and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and in 2014 completed a practice-based PhD at Winchester School of Art. In 2013 she exhibited in Bloomberg New Contemporaries, at Spike Island and the ICA and in 2014 New Order II at Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2016 she showed a work in Painting in Time: Part Two at the School of Art Institute Chicago.

Solo and two-person exhibitions include Escape the Esplande, Limbo, Margate (2013) The King of Hearts Has No Moustache, Gallery Vela, London (2012); and My Brother is a Hairy Man, with James Ferris, at George Polke, London (2011).