Emily Hawkins at BYU’s Weight Room Gallery, where she is installing her MFA exhibition I Will Defend Myself. Image by Gina Cavallo.

Coming back to Utah after the pandemic allowed Emily Hawkins to embark on a new path—an MFA at Brigham Young University. Twenty years after receiving a BFA in photography from the University of Utah, the mother of four has found her voice and broadened her media to incorporate printmaking, sculpture, video, and sound. These are all highlighted in her short-run MFA thesis exhibition at BYU’s Weight Room Gallery.

The exhibition features several multi-media works. “I Will Defend My Self,” 2026, is an installation of a framed print of her grandmother ironing, accompanied by a poem by Polish poet Anna Świr. Hawkins reached out to 150 mothers—some she knew, some BYU faculty and others she didn’t know—to ask for their recorded response to the poem. These recordings serve as the sound element in the work, accessible to visitors through a 1980s wall phone complete with a Rest-a-Phone shoulder support. Hawkins says the looped responses are “the catalyst for my show, the idea of defending the self—the self of mother, maintaining that identity while being so consumed by raising children.”

Emily Hawkins, “Load Bearing,” (rendering) 2026, OSB, video, 159 x 18 x 6.5 in.

Motherhood is the foundation of all her work ,and the other pieces in the show reflect her own experience as a mother. “Load Bearing,” 2026, displays videos of her four children sleeping, housed in a large OSB wall form. Other works include blueprint racks holding prints she’s created about her plans that didn’t happen after she became a mother; three sugar-melt floor sculptures holding tightly to electric mixer paddles; and a poster she’s made featuring Greco-Roman sculptures of women, broken and missing parts of their bodies. “The idea of erasure, and invisibility or loss of identity felt conceptually linked to what I’m interested in.”

In one of the two small side galleries, Hawkins presents another installation titled “Leftovers,” this time using our old friend Tupperware. “It’s going to function like a kitchen cupboard that has everything shoved in it,” she says, “and it’s going to be spilling out with Tupperware. It’s the idea of empty containers as a base material, like a storage material that embodies the maternal body in a way. [It reflects] the idea of trying to preserve something, the idea of excess and chaos, and you can’t do it all.”

Another video work, “The Hidden Mother,” references the strange-to-us Victorian practice of photographing children held by their mothers who end up hidden or erased from the image. Hawkins installation is inspired by video artist Paul Pfeiffer, though her very feminine imagery contrasts with his masculine sports imagery. Her video is run through a 1990s Sony projector, retrofitted by a BYU mechanical engineering student and some welders, to mimic Pfeiffer’s armature for his displays. For the closing reception of her MFA thesis exhibition, she has enlisted the artistic director of contemporary dance at BYU. “I gave her carte blanche to come up with a response and movement to how she might respond to these ideas [of the Victorian motherless imagery].”

Emily Hawkins, “I Will Defend My Self,” 2026 Print, frame, telephone, audio

Her work in the exhibition reflects the intersection of her life experiences as a mother with experimental exploration of different media new to her. After completing her undergraduate work, Hawkins felt disconnected from both photography and the art world, describing the period as “a real loss of identity.” A decade later, encouraged by an artist friend after the birth of her fourth child, she returned to making art, realizing it was “a way I could express myself that I really need.” Photography became an accessible entry point, though she struggled with what felt like “a saturated world of images” that made meaning difficult to find. Joining a cooperative gallery in Spokane — where annual exhibitions provided both deadlines and community — became “a game changer,” helping her overcome isolation and reconnect with artistic practice. After moving back to Utah, she shifted into printmaking, a transition that ultimately led her to pursue an MFA. Having worked across many mediums, she now identifies primarily as a conceptual artist.

Emily’s work provides insights into motherhood, its tensions and joys, as well as inspiration for the perseverance of creativity and its drive within us to create and to fight for our often-hidden selves within the complexities of everyday life.

Emily Hawkins: I Will Defend Myself, Weight Room Gallery, BYU (1125 N University Avenue), February 26 – March 5, 2026. Closing Reception & Performance: March 5, 7–9 pm Live performances at 7:00 and 7:30 pm.

Gina Cavallo

Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.