In 2020, Hady Barry was living with a close friend and her family—which included the friend’s husband, their young daughter, the nanny, and the family dog. When her friend became pregnant with a second child, Barry found herself reflecting on the idea of motherhood and considering whether she wanted to start a family of her own. “As much as I enjoyed my freedom,” she explains, “as a woman heading into her mid-thirties, unmarried and without a child, I also wondered if something important was passing me by.” This inspired the artist to create her seminal series, Wearing the Inside Out. The series documents the two women’s intertwined lives and explores Barry’s ambivalence around motherhood.
Aiming to adapt Wearing the Inside Out into a book, Barry traveled to Japan in 2023 to attend the ‘Photobook as an Object’ workshop with Yumi Goto. However, as she revisited the project, she realized that her conflicted feelings about motherhood were deeply rooted in her complicated history with her own mother. “At 13, I became responsible for my three younger siblings,” Barry remembers, “We had fled the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, and soon after arriving in Senegal, my mother left for the US to seek asylum for our family.
During her three-year absence, our father was often away for work. The profound absence of both my parents left me with a deep sense of abandonment that I carried into adulthood.” This revelation led her to start a new book project, bridging the past and present through the interplay of black and white photographs, personal writings, and selected family archives.
Barry produced i am (not) your mother during a residency at Penumbra Foundation in 2024. The residency took place within Press Print, an exhibition featuring 270 publications from around the world that celebrated the diversity of Risograph printing. Working directly in the gallery space, surrounded by this collection, deepened her appreciation for the creative potential of the medium. In response, she crafted an intimate object that reflects her complex, evolving relationship with her mother through its soft matte finish, hand-stitched binding, and raw palette of overlapping blacks, reds, and yellows.
From the outset, the book’s cover suggests the changing nature of a complex bond. Its soft matte surface features a close-up photograph of the artist’s mother as a young woman, smiling at someone outside the frame, while the back cover shows a more recent image of her gazing directly at the camera. Opening the book reveals an exposed spine with hand-stitched binding and a flyleaf bearing the handwritten title—I am (not) your mother—with brackets around ‘not,’ inviting two contrasting interpretations.
Barry’s limited palette of black, red, and yellow unifies the elements of her Risograph book into an intimate dialog across time. Photographs from the Barry family archive—her mother dancing at a party or cradling her as an infant—are smeared with red, expressing the raw emotion embedded in their nostalgic softness. At the book’s centerfold, narrow pink pages hold journal entries from the early 2000s, laden with overwhelming responsibility. As if in response, her mother’s words, transcribed from recent conversations, appear over her black and white photographs in red handwritten script; they follow organic forms—one tracing the artist’s arm with “You were too young,” another following the contour of a leaf with “I don’t want to hurt you more than I have.”
When we give our struggles shape, they transform from hidden traumas into tangible narratives—ones we can engage with more openly and intimately. Creating i am (not) your mother was a cathartic experience for Barry, helping her process and let go of emotional burdens from the past. “The weight I once carried is gone.” She states, “While the diary entries are deeply personal, they no longer hold the same emotional intensity for me. I realized this when my younger brother read them. He became emotional, but for me, the charge was gone. In a way, making the book was an exorcism—releasing something I had carried for so long.”
Artist books also have the power to forge intimate connections with others. Infused with the subtle, earthy fragrance of vegetable-based ink, i am (not) your mother is an intimate object that draws readers in, helping us recognize ourselves within its narrative. Even after the final page is turned, the faint trace of ink on the fingertips lingers, leaving behind a physical imprint of the story. “It has been fascinating to see how people find reflections of their own stories, their relationships with their parents, or other personal connections to my work,” Barry explains, “That’s something I’ve experienced myself with books. That is why I love this medium—it fosters an intimate, personal relationship and dialog.”
ISBN: 979-8-218-53091-4
