Katherine Hubbard’s The Great Room is a profoundly personal series made in collaboration with her mother. 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. Hubbard uses performance and domestic architecture to explore grief, motherhood, queerness, and the labour of caregiving.
Working with large-format cameras and experimental darkroom techniques, Hubbard transforms her family home—a space both 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 engaging daily rituals such as bathing, organising, and watching TV: compositions that blend seamlessly with unguarded intimacy. This is the first time Hubbard has consistently photographed another person; here photography becomes more than documentation, an entanglement of touch and gesture, the domestic and the maternal.
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 an act of presence and love.
Katherine Hubbard (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges photography, performance, and text. Her book a slight cast down at the edges of the lips was published by Capricious in 2023, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. The book was published in May 2025: 88 pages, 40 tritone plates, 219 × 290 mm, section-sewn debossed printed hardcover, with a text by the artist, designed by Loose Joints Studio. It was nominated for PhotoBook of the Year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2025, and shortlisted for the Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025 Author Book Award.
