I am Mackenzie King Howerton.

My work has always lived in self-portraiture in some form. I turned the camera on myself first out of availability, then out of necessity– as a way of bearing witness to whoever I was becoming. Becoming a mother changed everything. The woman I had been became someone harder to locate in the frame, and for a long time I wasn't sure whether I was lost or in the process of being remade. I understand now that both were true.

Motherhood became my subject not because I chose it, but because it chose me completely. I photograph the mundane moments that I know with time will turn precious, like the blinked shutter or the ordinary afternoon, because I believe the candid holds a truth the posed image rarely reaches. My children appear in my work not as subjects but as co-authors of my becoming. Alongside photography, I work in other mediums, often merging them: cyanotypes on thrown plates, photographic negatives made from placental tissue, hair cut during illness. These materials are not metaphors I reach for– they are the actual stuff of my life.

I battled Hyperemesis Gravidarum through two of my three full-term pregnancies. Bedridden for months at a time, I watched my body transform matter into new life while simultaneously consuming itself. The suffering was real, and I have tried to meet it honestly, not as wound alone, but as the site of a profound interior shift. As my body nurtured and changed, so did I. I was being reborn.

My practice holds transformation as both grief and devotion. I am interested in the way caregiving fractures and remakes identity; I explore the way the domestic and the visceral coexist without apology, the way identity itself is not a single seamless image but a patchwork sewn together, marked by seams and rips and the traces of pressure, care, and time. What I make is an attempt to be an honest witness to becoming: to the mother I have had to learn to be, to the woman I am still finding, and to all of it held together, visible seams and all.