Help weave the tapestry of community storytelling by sharing a meaningful story, memory, or experience related to motherhood, matrescence and/or caregiving. Stories will be used in the following video project Sideshow Mama.

Sideshow Mama is my current and ongoing video project. The work consists of staged video vignettes built from performative actions, symbolic props, and collaborative storytelling. Rooted in my experience as a disabled parent, the project explores the caregiving body as both visible and overlooked, scrutinized, yet rarely understood. While the work emerges from my own lived experience, its scope is intentionally collective. I gather stories from caregivers across my community, disabled and non-disabled alike, and translate these shared narratives into ritualized visual environments. Caregiving is both deeply personal and nearly universal. By giving form to these experiences, I aim to create space for recognition, connection, and empathy.

In Sideshow Mama, the caregiving body becomes a ceremonial image constructed for the camera. Using green screen, video compositing, and symbolic adornment, milk bottles, doll-babies, textiles and medical supports, I build layered visual tableaux where everyday acts of care are transformed into deliberate, ritual gestures. These objects accumulate and extend from the body, referencing the visual language of historical sideshow imagery while also expressing the emotional and physical extension caregiving requires. Actions such as warming a bottle, soothing, or adjusting supportive devices are slowed and repeated, emphasizing caregiving as sustained, embodied labor.

I implore you to add your story to Sideshow Mama.

Warmly,

Kim Hopson