London Gallery Owner Creates Beauty Wherever She Goes

Two weeks ago, I sat in a nexus where art, culture, and ecology meet to get a lesson in the “school of life.” It was from an extraordinary teacher who was living an amazing life and creating an innovative haven for artists.

Tucked away on a tiny street in Bloomsbury, the literary and intellectual hearth of central London, is the October Gallery and its globe-skipping American director, Chili Hawes. Enter this nineteenth-century former Church of England school and you will find a gallery space filled with people and art from far away places like Japan, Ghana, Benin, Palestine, Kenya, and Australia.

Hawes has a multicultural sensibility that stands out, even in a diverse place like London. In the October Gallery, the walls, the rooms, the courtyard, and the people tell the story of a peripatetic life that led Hawes from her native Colorado to explore the world. But wherever she landed, she has been focused on creating beauty.

The October Gallery currently features the work of Benin’s Romuald Hazoumé, among other artists. Hazoumé uses various forms of media to create a dialogue about sometimes-painful events that have shaped both his country’s history and contemporary international culture. His “Market Forces: Better to Sell Meat than Men!” is one such artwork. The panoramic photograph series captures the former site of an open sandy landscape where Africans had been sold and transported onto slave ships during the height of the British and European slave trade. The area is now a market for goat sellers. Gallery literature says the contemporary market “provoke[s] reflection on the financial evaluation of lives, and the dangers of ignoring the recurring patterns of history.”

The transatlantic slave trade is a particularly poignant subject as 2007 marks the bicentenary for the abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire. There is a shipload of controversy surrounding the topic, and the October Gallery has become a forum for artistic dialogue.

The concept of transforming people from an automatic state to a much more sensitive state when they view art could be the overarching philosophy used to explain the exotic series of events that led Hawes to becoming the director of a flourishing gallery more than twenty-eight years ago.

Rewind to the 1950s in Grand Junction, Colorado and you would find a young Hawes, itching for adventure, living in a small community of 28,000. “I wanted to see the world,” she said. “I wanted to go where they didn’t speak English.” So in her junior year, she attended the University of Paris-Sorbonne to learn French (she also speaks Spanish). “This meant so much to me—to go away for a year outside my country—and then I was off.”

Off she went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to make adobe houses. Off she went to build potteries and wood and metal shops. For a while, she even assayed silver, copper, and platinum. By this time, she was working with a small group of like-minded friends. It was 1967 and they had met in San Francisco. By 1974, their relationship had a name. “We formed what we called the Institute of Ecotechnics, using ecology and techniques in harmony.” The group designs projects that establish a relationship between people and the environment in different biomes—seas, rainforests, deserts, savannahs, and urban areas.

This mission enabled Hawes to trek across the globe, living out her desire for adventure. After building solar and wind powered homes and constructing a 50-foot diameter geodesic dome in New Mexico, they farmed in France. On a ranch in Aix-en-Provence, they raised winter wheat, chickens, rabbits, and pigs. Hawes also had three children.

From France, they moved to western Australia, near Derby, to help battle 5,000 acres of eucalyptus roots, now serenely called Birdwood Downs. It was to raise drought-resistant seeds that they in turn sold to countries affected by aridity.

Up until then, Ecotechnics’ aim for a city project had not materialized, although a sea project produced the RV Heraclitus, a deep-ocean research vessel.