Katherine Hubbard on Making Art With Her Ageing Mother

This article appears in the columns section of frieze 238, ‘Family Constellations’

My mom sits on the bed looking at the pile on the floor and sighs. She is overwhelmed by the pile, but the pile only continues to grow with bills and letters and notes she writes to herself about the bills, and notes about the things she wants to remember to tell me or notes about the things she wants to remember herself but knows she will forget.

‘Tell Katie I love dick was filmed in Marfa.’ I find this note every time I am home. This one lives in the stack of small notes that pile up in the kitchen on the counter just under the radio mounted under the cabinet. These notes live between the cutting boards and the vitamins and, somehow, I always pick this one up. I already know that I Love Dick (2016–17) was filmed in Marfa and, by the way, my mom has never actually told me that I Love Dick was filmed in Marfa – but, she does know I did a residency there and she does know Marfa is in Texas and she does know she visited me in Texas, in Marfa, when I did a residency there. She did, at one point in time, hear this bit of information, perhaps on the radio, and write it down because she wants me to know that she knows this tiny thread of information that might connect us, as in she knows something that relates to something she knows I was a part of at some point in time, but she never actually remembers to say anything to me about it. She never actually reads the note and remembers to say it out loud.

‘Hey Katie, did you know that I Love Dick was filmed in Marfa?’

‘Yes, Mom, I know that I Love Dick was filmed in Marfa.’

The brain is a complicated thing.

***

New facial expressions I have never seen before: how do I describe them? One cheek lifts up so that the eye squints slightly from the pressure but, being only on one side of the face, it’s a cockeyed expression. The lips form a taut straight line but lift into a semi-hook shape on one side. The face is sincere, and I guess the best way to describe the face is confused, except I am not sure how to describe the look of confusion when I have never seen it before on this face, on this head, on this neck, on this body, on this configuration of a being that is so familiar it feels like me. And I have never seen myself – I mean, her; I mean, my mom – look confused before, so even though I understand what a look of confusion is, it means something different when you’ve never seen it before. The look of confusion isn’t the same look of confusion on everybody. On this face, on this body, the look of confusion is a gut punch and, if my mom knew it was happening, she would hate it. We were lying on her bed talking, and the new expression came. I registered it as terrifying and sad and new all at once without clocking those registers. The look just sort of lay down on top of me.

‘So, we’re selling the house, right?’

‘Yes, Mom, we’re selling the house.’

How do you apply tense to a person who is in the process of becoming someone new? Aren’t we all in the process of becoming someone new all the time? Shedding, right? We’re all shedding, and isn’t it wonderful? What kind of tense is appropriate when the emotional registers that have guided an individual’s sense of personhood for their entire adult life slip because they can’t remember to feel how they’ve always felt?

When I think of you and see you, it is as the whole person I have known you to be

*** 

Don’t look at the woodwork rotting around the windows and the tarp positioned over the basement entrance with bricks on top to keep it from catching the wind. It probably keeps out the rain, so you’re better off not looking and don’t look at the missing shingles and the holes where you know squirrels nest inside the walls. Don’t look at the small mat positioned in the middle of the porch to keep the tenants from tripping on the part of the cement that is cracked and raised up. The large brass round doorknob practically falls into your hand every time you turn it to come inside. Welcome home – here’s a doorknob! Don’t look at the plants with leaky bottoms sitting on the wooden sill, and don’t look at the plants that were forgotten and never got watered and have dehydrated to the point where the soil seems to have contracted in a hardened shape of the pot, almost a fossilized puck but you’re better off not looking.

***

Doesn’t this seem valuable and isn’t it worth something and we should keep it because it’s worth something but let’s not use it because it’s worth something. It’s worth something because it costs something new, and I got it used for much less so I had to buy it because it was such a deal and it is worth something because it is valued as being more than what I paid for it used, so do you know anyone who wants it and can use it because I already have one?

***

The pantry moths bore their way into every bit of wool, cashmere and cotton in the house. The moths bore into things and eat them millimetre by millimetre and bury their delicately spindled eggs into the fabrics. Each insect is born into both luxury and a source of nutrition, feeding off the hand-crocheted sweater from my childhood friend’s mother who is no longer alive and my mom’s sweaters that are held together just barely by the threads between the holes. They flutter drunkenly out of the corners, cabinets drawers and closets, and we keep killing them but like everything it has become a problem with no discernible centre, so it’s bigger than anything you can muster to wrangle – drunk on the material that makes up this place, sourcing life as a regurgitated, repurposed kilim rug left folded in the closet for many years. But it’s still worth something, still worth something even in parts.

***

You might like to know that, when I think of you and see you, it is as the whole person I have known you to be, bringing with you every single past experience, and that this turning inside out – this change – is no different, but it is accelerated and, as opposed to other years that felt additive, this time is stripping you back. You’re cashing in your neurotic and self-defensive poker chips that you’ve horded over many years – reluctantly at first, but now more willingly. You might like to know that, when I think of you and see you, it’s as a whole person.

This text is excerpted from an untitled essay which considers queer mothering, photography as care work, blood, dementia and why inversions fail us.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in frieze issue 238 with the headline ‘The Great Room’

_{Main image: Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (hand to face), 2021. Courtesy: the artist and Company Gallery, New York}