Mother Mine,

2025

Photographs / archival pigment print

Seal Beach, California

Maja Sofie turns to a single subject—her mother—examining the face as both image and structure. Across the series, situations and expression shifts between composure and distortion, authority and vulnerability. The familiar surface of the maternal figure becomes unstable.

Rather than presenting motherhood as archetype, the face becomes terrain—marked, altered, and reconfigured by age.

Moments of control give way to exaggeration or collapse. Laughter interrupts severity; defiance unsettles expectation. The portrait oscillates between recognition and estrangement, complicating the cultural image of the mother as fixed or selfless.

Motherhood is not idealized; it is embodied. The work asks how identity persists—and shifts—when the face that once signified origin begins to transform.