Emily Hawkins, “Photogram 27: Paper Airplanes,” 2022, cyanotype on paper, 15.75 x 11.75 in

When Emily Hawkins exhibited two pigment-printed photographs from her “Matriarch Diptych” series this year in the Bountiful Davis Art Center’s juried annual, and one took first prize, her image of a luminous presence prompted speculation that she meant to invoke a divine being. Indeed, she may have had that intention, but Re/Play, her present display of works done during her just-completed residency at Modern West, suggests a direct response to discoveries made while working on that earlier series. The matriarch she meant to elevate might be an actual mother: at the risk of making her appear grandiose, a kind of universal self-portrait. It was not, after all, how a hands-on mother is likely to see her mundane self, but an expression of what a mother might feel upon realizing who she really is: the indispensable means of coming into being not only for her own children, but for the continuity of all life. It’s a huge, but perfectly credible discovery, one that points to her role, and her children’s roles, as something deserving some more genuine acknowledgement than the lip-service it usually receives.

View of Emily Hawkins’ work in progress at Modern West (photo by Geoff Wichert)

It helps to know that Hawkins has four children, two each boys and girls, and that the oldest is approaching a landmark associated with the beginning of independence. Thus she can see ahead to the end of her maternal role as she has known it. Regardless one’s religious or cultural perspective, this is a time for reflection and recollection. Among Utah’s artists, however, this often takes such particularly charming forms as mock reliquaries: sculptures that, like the early Christian originals, protect and display objects imbued with sentimental importance, even as their aesthetic qualities prevent a wealth of feelings from dwindling into sentimentality. Jason Lanegan asks a partially-eaten and enshrined PB&J sandwich to rekindle memories of a certain afternoon. Hawkins, taking a different approach, fashions memorials to her children’s toys: the tools that helped them fashion their unique personalities. The durable, two-dimensional copies in Re/Play, made from direct contact with the toys her children have played with, but which may soon be abandoned, serve the same goals.

Emily Hawkins, “Fossils: Paper Airplanes,” 2022, embossment on paper, 23.25 x 19 in.

Compare, for example, two celebrations of her son’s interest in paper airplanes. One, a cyanotype on paper, she labels as “Photogram 27.” Here she presents the blue, solar shadows of eight classic folded paper planes. Nearby hangs an embossment made by running other paper airplanes through a press with an impressibly soft sheet of paper. This she titles “Fossils: Paper Airplanes.” So there are several categories of such memorials. (Presumably “reliquary” would be another, though not currently among hers.) The paper airplane’s puffy forms and suggestion of a sailboat’s sails prove the conceptual link to airfoils to be sound, and the addition of curves to the triangles made the geometry more sensual. It all fell into place when I noticed a durable version of the original plane on a nearly pedestal, an intermediate relic between the originals and their various recollections. Some of the photograms could be mistaken for those of early twentieth-century masters.

Surely among the important toys are building blocks, or similar toys based on blocks. Blocks enhanced with letters teach the most basic reading skills, while the generic nature of the toy forms an early lesson in creativity: adapting materials across categories and disciplines. Hawkins further sculpts blocks that were wood or plastic into clay, a suitable monumental material, in “Play, Play, Play Memorial,” but also illustrates them in use in “Fossils From Everyday Life: Blocks,” where they are seen precariously stacked, possibly already falling. She also drapes, fires, and glazes ceramic sheets over blocks to produce what she calls “Homescapes.”

Emily Hawkins, “Fossils: Stacked Blocks,” 2022, embossment on paper, 23.25 x 19 in.

Both the toys and the techniques Hawkins employs are familiar, but her combinations feel fresh and freely arrived at. All the same, a project like this involves a lot of experimentation, and it is through the generosity of Diane Stewart and the Modern West staff that the space provided for the Artist in Residence is commonly open to the public. During Hawkins’ residence it was possible to view dozens of raw and just-completed works: far more than there is room for in Re/Play. Thanks to the equipment, expertise, and once again the generosity of Saltgrass Printmakers, located at the other end of the building from Modern West, Hawkins was able to make the numerous embossments of, for example, dominos, that gave a rare sense of the excitement of a busy studio. The assorted tableaux that eventually filled the workspace, tables covered in those randomly placed trial efforts, was something that would be familiar to anyone who knows active children. To see so much evidence of child play immortalized in their mother’s art brought on a revelation; one that closed the loop, bringing a matriarch, her children, an artist, and another possible generation of each together through the process and product of making art.

Emily Hawkins: Re/Play, Upstairs at Modern West, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 4

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.