‘She knows she will forget': Grief, dementia and motherhood

The Guardian

21-05-2025

Photographer Katherine Hubbard uses performance and domestic architecture to explore grief, motherhood, queerness and the labour of caregiving. Using large-format cameras and experimental darkroom techniques, The Great Room is a profoundly personal series by the interdisciplinary artist in collaboration with her mother. The Great Room can be purchased from Loose Joints publishers
In 2020 – a year defined by introspection, caretaking and the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic – Hubbard's mother began experiencing severe memory loss, later diagnosed as LATE, a brain disease mimicking the symptoms of Alzheimer's
This is the first time Hubbard has consistently photographed another person. Here, photography becomes more than documentation. It is an entanglement of touch and gesture, the domestic and the maternal which confront the pain of losing the familiar essence of her mother
While cleaning out the property, Hubbard discovered a pile of mirrored closet doors among her mother's collection of architectural salvage. Assembled into freestanding sculptures on wheels, these mobile mirrors moved through the now emptied home. Hubbard staged a series of photographs that fracture, multiply and obscure the space and its inhabitants
In collaboration with her mother, Hubbard transforms her family home – a space overwhelming and deeply familiar – into a psychological landscape. These cluttered rooms become a layered stage where her mother serves as partner in an ongoing exploration of the real and performed
Together, they create photographs that engage with daily rituals such as bathing, organising, and watching TV: compositions that blend seamlessly with unguarded intimacy. This photographic series ruptures the quotidian in an exploration of care work, memory, grief and the entropy of loss
Hubbard's practice pushes against the flattening of the photographic image, critically engaging performance, sculptural elements and the implicit power dynamics in the social contract between the photographer and her subject
Hubbard also creates experimental body-contact prints in the darkroom with her mother that trace the textures of skin and the physicality of aging. These tactile works materialise ability and the weight of time, celebrating the complexity of their relationship while questioning the roles of artist, subject and collaborator. In The Great Room, Hubbard reimagines the home as a space where photography transforms care and the slow grief of dementia into a powerful act of presence and love
Katherine Hubbard: 'My mom sits on the bed looking at the pile on the floor and sighs. She is overwhelmed by the pile, but the pile only continues to grow with bills and letters and notes she writes to herself about the bills, and notes about the things she wants to remember to tell me or notes about the things she wants to remember herself but knows she will forget'
''So, we're selling the house, right?', 'Yes, Mom, we're selling the house.' How do you apply tense to a person who is in the process of becoming someone new? Aren't we all in the process of becoming someone new all the time? Shedding, right? We're all shedding, and isn't it wonderful?'
'You might like to know that, when I think of you and see you, it is as the whole person I have known you to be, bringing with you every single past experience, and that this turning inside out – this change – is no different, but it is accelerated and, as opposed to other years that felt additive, this time is stripping you back'
'You're cashing in your neurotic and self-defensive poker chips that you've hoarded over many years – reluctantly at first, but now more willingly'