MOTHER FIGURE, 2025 - ongoing

In this photographic series, I invite participants to pose with me as a stand-in for their mother or a maternal figure. Together, we draw from their memories of childhood touch, using these recollections to construct each pose. I also reference gestures and compositions from religious iconography and art history, layering personal memory with collective visual language.

By inhabiting this maternal role, I create a space for participants to reenact and reimagine formative experiences. The resulting images hover between documentary and fantasy, blurring distinctions between lived history and staged performance. Through an emphasis on touch and gesture, the photographs trace the complex spectrum of relationships with caregivers: attachment and security, tension and neglect, intimacy and eroticism.

This project emerges from my own conflict about whether to have children of my own. Within these images, I project both my fantasies and fears, while also exploring forms of “mothering” that exist outside of parenthood. Photography is a medium that holds a dynamic tension between what is visible and concealed, real and constructed. It both affirms and destabilizes reality. Through this process, I use the camera to probe, excavate, and rework my own memories alongside those of my participants, engaging with evolving ideas of family and care.

Press:

Sixty Inches from Center, Remembering Together

Roots & Cultue, KIN: Kat Bawden & Ruby Que

The Visualist, Kat Bawden & Ruby Que: KIN