MOTHER FIGURE, 2025 - ongoing

Mother Figure traces the complex spectrum of maternal-child relationships, exploring attachment and safety, tension and neglect, intimacy and eroticism. In this photographic series, I invite participants to pose with me as a stand-in for their mother.

I approach photography performatively, attentive to how images act as projections of selfhood and desire. My process for Mother Figure is inspired by the practice of psychodrama therapy, in which participants reenact memories in order to confront emotional conflicts and address traumatic experience. I work collaboratively with my participants – which includes my own mother – to construct poses based on their specific childhood memories, while also drawing gestures from religious iconography, art history, and folklore.

When I began this series, I was recently divorced. I grieved not having children and craved being seen in the role of a parent. This project became a place where I could project my lingering fantasies and fears about motherhood while also exploring forms of “mothering” that exist outside of biological family, as I offer myself as a mother figure to my friends, and even to my own mom.

Alongside the still images is an interactive slideshow installation, Untitled (Being My Mother’s Mother). The work consists of two slide projectors each displaying 40 photographs of my mother and me. In these images, I pose with my mother while I embody her mother, reenacting their relationship and exploring the complexities of our own mother-child dynamic. Each photograph is split in half and distributed across two projectors: one projector displays images of me, while the other displays images of my mother. Viewers can advance the slides independently, creating ever-shifting combinations in which we appear to reach toward one another, pull apart, embrace, or resist.

This series harnesses the intertwined alchemy of photography and memory to explore how images shape, preserve, and transform our understandings of family and self. Together, the works invite viewers to reflect on kinship and absence in their own lives, and consider the prismatic relationship between lived experience and its photographic trace.

Press:

Sixty Inches from Center, Remembering Together

Roots & Cultue, KIN: Kat Bawden & Ruby Que

The Visualist, Kat Bawden & Ruby Que: KIN