MOTHER: mirror mirror on the wall
In MOTHER, I turned my camera – and my collaborator, AI – toward the parts of motherhood we’re taught not to see. After becoming a mother twice over, my body and psyche bore little resemblance to the glowing, serene maternal figures I had grown up seeing in both media and art. I wanted to know: what would happen if I asked artificial intelligence to show me a mother’s physical reality – stretch marks, cesarean scars, menstruation, the things we’re taught to hide?
For some of the works, I fed my own body’s stories (actual photos) into the machine: stretch marks charting pregnancy’s geography, scars etched by birth’s violence, the raw tenderness of breastfeeding. In other cases, I used words to describe an experience of motherhood in order to extricate the machine's versions of these events. The results were startling. Too often, the AI translated these and other experiences of motherhood through the male gaze – pornographic, sanitized, or pathologized. Sometimes the images were almost comically naive. But occasionally, AI conjured something heartbreakingly true, as if glimpsing the sacred in the maternal.
Like my earlier project Artificial Childhood Memories, which explored technology’s reshaping of memory, this series interrogates how AI reflects and amplifies cultural mythologies. Art history, advertising, and social media polish motherhood into a white-washed, untouchable ideal. This immaculate vision erases the darker truths mothers live daily: bodies split open, exhaustion, ambivalence, transformation. MOTHER asks: What does it mean that systems learning to “see” us are trained on a world that refuses to see the fullness of female experience? And how does that shape the way we see ourselves?
Ultimately, this work is about visibility and invisibility in the digital age. Through AI, I hope to illuminate not just what technology reveals about motherhood, but what it conceals – and to allow the messy, magnificent, entirely human truth of mothering to appear.
Danielle King, September 2025
