Claudia Caporn, 'What She Carried, What I Carry'
(L) 89 x 71 cm (R) 50.8 x 40.6 cm (diptych)
Archival Print 4x5 Film Sheet Negatives on Photographic Rag
Edition 1/5 
$800
 
This diptych bridges nearly three decades, situating my mother and me within a shared visual and temporal frame. The first image, taken in 1997, depicts my mother at 28 years and one month old, heavily pregnant with me, her first child. The second image is a self-portrait, made at the exact same age, in the same room, before the same wardrobe. Where her body carries imminent new life, mine carries the weight of a different question: what does maternity mean to the daughters who stand on its threshold but do not yet, or may never, cross it? 
 
Created as part of my PhD research into maternal inheritance and the mother/daughter dyad, this work engages Alison Stone’s concept of ‘maternal space’ - a space at once inherited, negotiated, and reimagined. The visual echo underscores our continuities, yet the subtle differences - my unfilled womb, the deliberate act of holding the shutter release - speak to the shifting terrain of womanhood across generations. 
 
In revisiting my mother’s portrait, I do not merely replicate her image; I confront the intergenerational scripts that shape maternity, and the contemporary ‘crisis’ that unsettles its meaning. The photograph becomes both mirror and question, an intimate inheritance under examination. 
 
 
Claudia Caporn is a fine art documentary photographer and researcher whose work traces the intersections of place, identity, and maternal inheritance. Based in Quairading, Western Australia, her practice is grounded in the textures of rural life on her family’s wheat and sheep farm, where the expanses of the Wheatbelt shaped her enduring fascination with belonging, legacy, and the human condition. 
 
Since leaving her hometown at thirteen to study in Perth, Claudia has moved between rural and urban worlds, a dual perspective that informs the vernacular and affective qualities of her images. Her current research draws on feminist philosophy to examine the contemporary crisis of maternity and how photography can reveal intergenerational transformations of subjectivity. 
 
Claudia was awarded the inaugural Minderoo Foundation Artist Fund grant in 2021 and was selected as the sole Western Australian participant in the PHOTO2020 x Magnum Photos Student Intensive in Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including in The Netherlands, China, and Italy. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Advertising and Graphic Design, and Photography, and completed First Class Honours in Photography at Curtin University. She is currently undertaking a PhD, where image-making and theory converge in a practice of inquiry and care.