Katherine Hubbard – The Great Room

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 interdisciplinary artist Katherine Hubbard 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. In collaboration with her mother, 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 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. 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. In addition Hubbard 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 (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges photography, performance, and text. Her practice explores analogue photography as an embodied process, using it to examine social politics, history, and narrative. 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. Hubbard holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently an Associate Professor of Art and MFA Graduate Director at Carnegie Mellon University. Hubbard is represented by Company Gallery . Hubbard’s solo exhibitions include Avoid glancing blows at Company Gallery; Katherine Hubbard at Higher Pictures; stages at Baxter St. Camera Club of New York; and Bring your own lights at The Kitchen. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Time Management Techniques at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ecstatic Land at Ballroom, Marfa, Texas; The Artist’s Museum at ICA Boston; and Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Konstfack in Stockholm, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. Print Edition also available 88 pages, 40 tritone plates, 219 × 290 mm Section-sewn debossed printed hardcover With a text by the artist Designed by Loose Joints Studio LJ213, May 2025 ISBN 978-1-912719-69-3 Prizes: Nominated for PhotoBook of the Year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2025 Shortlisted for Les Rencontres d'Arles 2025 Author Book Award Press: Guardian Financial Times Wallpaper De Groene Amsterdammer Figures Blind Magazine