Sandra Hawkins is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist in painting, photo-based work and installation. During her twenty-four year career as a professional artist, her work has received critical acclaim through juried exhibitions, awards, collections, artist residencies, and publications. Originally a leisure painter in watercolours during a previous career as a social scientist, in 1999 Sandra embarked on her current contemporary research-based art practice after obtaining the Bachelor of Fine Arts, Ottawa University. Her contemporary art investigations are located in the broader discussion on the fluidity of identity with place and references climate warming impacts in this regard.

In her successful Kickstart fundraiser to attend the Arctic Circle 2019 Arts & Sciences Expedition residency aboard a tall ship in Svalbard, Norway, she is quoted "I believe my art contributes to climate change discussions".  In 2023, her solo exhibition installation, In Search of Bearings, at Corridor 45/75 Gallery located in Ottawa's well travelled transit way, resonated on the socio-psycho impacts of climate warming.

Her well attended artist presentations are visually driven by her field photography, videos, paintings and multimedia installations. Visuals such as High Arctic melting glaciers and impacts to coastal ecologies are accompanied by a combination of her amusing anecdotal Arctic Expedition stories and back-up science research. She clarifies one of her missions as an artist is to make visible the sometimes inaccessible and overwhelming science data. Toward this end, she self-published the photo-book, Sailing the Top of the World  - Climate Change in the High Arctic.

Sandra's art is influenced by her everyday experiences, including leisure sail and shoreline kayaking on the Ottawa River and Britannia Bay. For example, she has taken courses in nautical navigation. Upon being gifted a huge collection of out-dated navigation chart maps of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, she has been incorporating the richness of their cartography, and international nautical culture of numerical and symbolic language into her creative production.

After many years of being recognized as an abstract expressionist painter, she is currently experimenting with what she terms "figurative abstract painting". An early example is shown in her profile. Sandra Hawkins enjoys working across disciplines and mediums using consistent themes relating to the intersecting dynamics of human-environmental relationship.

A life-time traveller, her exhibitions, artist residencies and workshops are across Canada including Ottawa, Toronto, the prestigious Banff Centre and several Canadian Arctic communities. International exposure of her work includes: Xi-ian China, Lahore Pakistan, Svalbard Norway, Vermont, Arizona and New York City in U.S.A, Berlin Germany, Budapest Hungary, Kalliningrad Russia, Bogata Columbia, Morocco Africa, and Republic of South Africa.

Ms. Hawkins' studio practice is currently based in Ottawa, close to her two daughters and two grandsons. She is currently exploring the medium of clay hand-building. Her intention is to create an installation that dialogues on the psychosocial uncertainties of rapid changes to familiar shorelines and places we call home. 

Distinctions include Elected Membership in the Society of Canadian Artists (SCA), K. M. Hunter Award Nominee by Ontario Art Council and Ontario Arts Foundation, and Premier's Award (Ontario) in Creative Arts nominee by St. Lawrence College Brockville Ontario. She was awarded the coveted Arctic Circle 2019 Arts & Sciences Expedition, an international residency on a tall ship sailing in Svalbard Archipelago close to the North Pole. First-hand observations of climate warming impacts to coastal ecologies in the Arctic Circle, The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River inspire her aesthetic investigations and artworks. Ms. Hawkins holds the Masters in Environmental Studies - York U., Bachelor of Fine Arts - Ottawa U., Bachelor of Arts Sociology and Architecture and post graduate studies in history of culture from Carleton U.