Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room

This major new installation by Katherine Hubbard (b. 1981, Philadelphia, USA) is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK. Centring the relationship between Hubbard and her mother, Antonette Berger, The Great Room navigates their encounters with illness, memory, changing identity and loss over a five-year period. 

Working across installation, performance, writing and analogue photography, Hubbard understands images and our experiences of them as live, ongoing processes. Having avoided photographing other people in her work until now, The Great Room marks a significant departure in the artist’s practice, but continues her interest in representation and the power structures embedded in the act of making a photograph.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Berger began to experience the effects of the progressive brain disease LATE, requiring Hubbard to act as her primary caregiver. Working with two 4×5 large-format film cameras, the two women moved through Berger’s home in Philadelphia, managing the daily routines of domestic life and gradually coming to the painful realisation that Berger’s living situation had become unsustainable.

In the resulting photographs, the objects and architecture of Berger’s grand but faded house, including mirrors, doorways and unexpected angles, create fractured glimpses and fragmented compositions that undermine the authority of any singular viewpoint or subject.

Referencing the walls used by Berger to divide the ‘great room’ of her home into a makeshift bedroom, ten partition walls create shifting sightlines as people move through the space. By suspending the photographs and revealing both the front and back of the images, the installation underscores the act of looking as both mediated and physical.

Throughout the exhibition are several contact prints, created by Hubbard and Berger in a traditional black-and-white darkroom. Coated in vaseline, they touched, leaned and pressed themselves directly onto photographic paper, making impressions with their bodies. Unmediated by a lens, these 1:1-scale works foreground the body as a tool capable of making its own mark, rather than being depicted by a camera.

Enabling experiences of loss, memory and changing identity to become tactile and spatialised, The Great Room considers how perspective indelibly shapes us, our relationships and the worlds we inhabit.