Mari Katayama

Sewing and the Beginnings of Self-Portraiture

Mari Katayama’s work began with sewing before it began with photography. Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1987 and raised in Gunma Prefecture, she wore leg braces and specialized shoes as a child, which made ready-made clothing difficult to wear without alteration. Her mother and grandmother sewed clothes to fit her body, and Katayama recalls handling needle and thread before she learned to use a pencil^*1. The habit of making what her body needed when no suitable product existed became the basis for carrying sewing from everyday necessity into artmaking.

Katayama underwent a double leg amputation at age nine because of congenital tibial hemimelia and has since lived with prosthetic legs. In high school, she made hand-sewn legs imagined from the limbs she had lost, decorated her prostheses, photographed herself wearing them, and shared the images online. Looking back, she has said that from the beginning she treated her own body, like fabric and prosthetic limbs, as one of the materials with which she made her work^*2.

After graduating from Gunma Prefectural Women’s University in 2010 and completing the Intermedia Art program at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, in 2012, Katayama developed a body of work spanning photography, sculpture, sewing, and performance. Her participation in Aichi Triennale 2013, Roppongi Crossing 2016, and the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 marked the movement of a method that began as personal self-imaging into both contemporary art and photography^*3*4.

Why Katayama Makes and Photographs the Work Herself

As a teenager, Katayama modeled for other photographers alongside objects she had made. Although she supplied both her body and the objects, the finished photograph became the photographer’s work. She has described the discomfort this caused and how it led her to decorate the room herself, repeatedly check the viewfinder, and take the photograph on her own^*5. In an interview with the V&A, she likewise explained that taking responsibility for both sides of the relationship—the person photographing and the person photographed—was one reason she began making self-portraits^*6.

Her process begins with sketches. She sews fabric legs and dolls, prepares clothing, furniture, mirrors, and lighting, and finally places her body within the arrangement to test the composition. Katayama has said that a single setup can take about a week and that she moves repeatedly between the camera and her position in the frame to adjust the image^*7. Photography is therefore not a record of sculpture already completed. It is the final stage in bringing sewing, sculpture, the room, and the pose into a single image.

Katayama has said that paintings she saw with her grandfather as a child strongly shaped her present method of holding composition, narrative, and thought within one image without explaining them in words^*6. Her photographs can suggest a story before and after the depicted moment, as a film still might, while also presenting body, object, color, and reflection simultaneously within a pictorially organized frame.

Pictorial Composition: Femininity, Prostheses, and Mirror Images

In Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, costume, makeup, gesture, and location produce women who seem to belong to imagined films^*8. Yasumasa Morimura enters the poses and compositions of canonical paintings and film stars, reperforming familiar figures through a different body^*9. Jeff Wall uses actors, lighting, and sets to construct events before the camera that appear to have occurred in the world^*10. Katayama also constructs the image in advance. Her central concern, however, is how the living body, prosthetic legs, clothing, dolls, and mirror images relate to one another and come to be seen as a body.

For Katayama, clothes and shoes were first an everyday question of whether anything commercially available would fit her body, before they became costumes selected to perform a feminine image. Because ready-made clothing and footwear did not imagine her body as their wearer, producing a feminine appearance required making clothing, prostheses, and shoes to fit that body^*11*1. Her compositions do more than quote existing images of femininity; they bring into the frame the garments and devices that make those images possible.

In you’re mine, a life-size doll cast from Katayama’s body, a self-portrait of her reclining on a bed, and her present reflection in a full-length mirror occupied the same installation. In the photograph, she wears heavy makeup and lingerie and adopts a pose reminiscent of Titian’s Venus, while what appears to be a stocking is a medical compression bandage. Ana Moyer argues that the conjunction of an art-historical female figure, adornment, and medical equipment makes visible both a norm of femininity and a disabled body often placed outside that norm^*11. Katayama does not position disability as the opposite of femininity. Dress, treatment, and desire occupy the same body and the same image.

In mirror, a tabletop mirror occupies the center of the composition. Inside it appears an upper-body portrait in which the prosthetic legs are largely absent; outside it, the prostheses and the objects in the room remain visible. Lou-Naëma Fischer-Barnicol reads the mirror as a device that repeats the photographic frame within the image, showing how different portraits of the same body can be produced through different acts of cropping^*12. Seen only within the mirror, Katayama approaches the conventions of an ordinary female portrait. Seen with the surrounding room, the body includes prosthetic limbs and its lived environment. The composition reveals how the appearance of a “normal” female body depends on what the image includes and excludes.

bystander #016 overlays the reclining figure of a seaside Venus, Naoshima onna bunraku—a form of puppetry in which a legless figure expresses emotion through the hands—and tentacle-like arms printed with photographs of other people’s hands. Kubiński argues that the overlap of figure, puppet, manipulating hands, and tentacles destabilizes distinctions between viewer and viewed, and between a human body and a fabricated one^*13. The idealized female figure, prosthetic limbs, and many-armed double coexist within one composition, allowing different bodily images and materials to operate at once.

tree of life: Mirrors and Reflections

For the recent series tree of life, Katayama built a purpose-made set of mirrored tiles in her studio, where reflections blur the boundaries between floor, walls, and ceiling. She placed her largest hand-sewn sculpture to date, costumes and wall elements reworked from earlier projects, and her own body within the set, then made the image in a single exposure on film^*6. The mirrors do not simply multiply the body as decoration. They create a space in which distinctions between self and other, object and reflection, floor and ceiling become unstable.

The Brooklyn Rail describes the works gathered in Synthesis as maximalist compositions in which color, pattern, reflection, shine, bodies, and objects fill the frame^*14. American Suburb X likewise notes the growing density of Katayama’s recent images, arguing that they ask viewers to move beyond concentrating on the prosthetic legs alone and to see body, object, studio, and performance as a whole^*15.

Sixtysix Magazine describes Katayama’s home and studio in Gunma as a lived yet deliberately arranged space in which household goods, records, fabric, shells, beads, and hand-sewn doubles occupy the same rooms^*5. In a 2026 interview with Vogue Japan, Katayama explained that her roles as artist, mother, and wife, together with collaborations with the prosthetics manufacturer Nabtesco and the shoe brand Sergio Rossi, had led her to consider the body through its relations with technology and other people^*16. Vogue Japan reads the mirrored space and long exposure of tree of life as part of a shift from the direct encounter with bodily replicas in her early work toward recent attempts to explore distance from and coexistence with objects^*16.

The High Heel Project: Femininity and Choice

The 2011 works Children’s Feet and I’m wearing little high heels, I have child’s feet connect Katayama’s early self-portraits with the High Heel Project. She has explained that I’m wearing little high heels imagines a child longing to become an adult, while Children’s Feet imagines a child backstage at a circus^*17. The prostheses and shoes function as devices that support walking and as objects associated with maturity and dress^*18.

The immediate catalyst for the project was an incident while Katayama was working at a nightclub, when someone told her that a woman who did not wear high heels was not a woman. Angered by the remark, she consulted a prosthetist and began developing high heels that could be worn with prosthetic legs^*17. The experience exposed the kinds of bodies assumed by commercially available footwear and prostheses. Katayama produced high heels in which she could actually walk, addressing dress and mobility through the same act of making.

Katayama has said that she wants high heels to become one ordinary option among many, rather than a sign reserved for a limited range of bodies^*19. The project therefore extends beyond decorating a prosthetic limb. It links prostheses, shoes, clothing, walking, the stage, and song, creating within daily life an option that standardized products had not provided.

Access to fashion does not resolve every problem. Laini Burton and Jana Melkumova-Reynolds argue that expressive prostheses can move disabled bodies out of a medical frame while also incorporating them into consumer culture. They distinguish Katayama’s sewn limbs and dolls, which reproduce her own body without correcting it toward symmetry or wholeness, from the normative bodies assumed by fashion models and mannequins^*26. The High Heel Project thus holds together two possibilities: access to forms of dress from which disabled bodies have been excluded, and the risk that disability will be repackaged as a new marketable image.

Major Works: you’re mine, bystander, and On the Way Home

The 2014 series you’re mine marked a turning point from early works in which Katayama placed herself in the image to display hand-sewn objects toward a concern with the body as it is seen within society. Through photographs, dolls, and mirrors, she asked “which one is me?” and reconsidered whether the object or the artist should occupy the principal role^*20.

For the 2016 series bystander, Katayama drew on the hands of the kuroko puppeteers who support figures in Naoshima onna bunraku. She photographed other people’s hands, printed them onto fabric, and sewed them into many-armed objects^*21. This was the first series in which other people’s bodies entered her work. Katayama has said that the process made her experience both the difficulty and the force of “living together”^*21.

On the Way Home was photographed in 2016 while Katayama was pregnant, in a river near where she grew up. She has said that thinking about her daughter’s life expanded her sense of time beyond the roughly one hundred years of an individual life toward past and future, making history feel like a personal matter^*21. For an exhibition the following year, she also described how reduced mobility and changes in body shape during pregnancy and childbirth heightened her awareness of her body and became material for self-portraiture^*17.

GIFT and Synthesis: Editing and Recent Work

Published in 2019, GIFT was Katayama’s first photobook and brought together several series made between 2007 and 2018. Her hand is embossed on the clothbound cover. An eye chart and fragments of the body appear near the beginning, followed by prosthetic limbs, hand-sewn objects, and self-portraits^*22. Conscientious Photography Magazine argues that this sequence causes the visually commanding portraits to be reread through the making of the objects and the bodily experience introduced earlier in the book^*23.

At the 58th Venice Biennale that same year, Katayama presented work combining photographs and hand-sewn sculptures^*4. Both GIFT and the Venice installation were cited when she received the 45th Kimura Ihei Photography Award^*24. The inclusion of both the photobook and exhibition indicates that her work was assessed through page sequence and spatial installation as well as through individual photographs.

Published in 2025, Synthesis gathers nine series made from 2019 to 2025, linking Katayama’s body after becoming a mother, her return to life in Gunma, the studio, caryatid, and tree of life^*14. Her early interiors centered on the relationship between the artist and her doubles. The recent work brings the home, land, surrounding environment, and earlier works into the frame. American Suburb X describes this development as a totality of making and performance that cannot be reduced to prosthetic limbs alone^*15.

Gender and Disability Through Composition

Katayama’s work is often introduced through her prosthetic legs and congenital physical condition. In an interview with LensCulture, she resisted limiting the work to disability rights or body positivity, describing it as an inquiry into conditions shared by human beings^*7. Katayama does not deny disability as a subject; she rejects readings that compress the work into an uplifting story of courage, a “new” beauty, or body positivity. Her concerns appear through concrete questions: whether the clothes she wants to wear fit her body, whether she can choose the shoes she wants, whether prosthetic legs can be dressed, and how the body can move within a room or on a stage. Sewing and composition arise from the same experience—making clothes for a body that standardized products do not accommodate, then making the space in which that body will be photographed.

High heels, medical compression bandages, decorated prostheses, and hand-sewn doubles do more than signify disability. They support the body, dress it, enable movement, and connect with femininity and desire in the photographs. Katayama has said that she does not regard a prosthetic limb as external to the body simply because it is artificial, and that neither an operated body nor a landscape altered by human hands can be cleanly divided into natural and artificial categories^*25. The visual continuity between the living body and fabricated objects gives form to this understanding.

A 2026 ArtReview essay warns that when prosthesis is used as a metaphor for technological fusion, loss, or trauma, the everyday realities of disabled life can disappear. It argues that Katayama keeps prostheses specific: supports for the body, surfaces she decorates, and objects worn in daily life^*27. Her photographs leave seams and joins visible. Prostheses remain things that are worn, maintained, and used, rather than generic signs of “human and machine.”

Katayama treats being a woman as one element available to her work and has said that communicating “female strength” is not its sole purpose^*25. Ana Moyer reads the placement of makeup, lingerie, high heels, and medical compression bandages within the same image as a composition that addresses conventions of femininity together with the disabled body^*11. Gender and disability do not appear as separate subjects in Katayama’s compositions. They emerge within the same encounters among body, clothing, medical devices, desire, and the gaze.

Mari Katayama in the History of Staged Photography

Simon Baker has situated Katayama’s work in relation to Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Matthew Barney^*2. She draws on established methods: performing with her own body, constructing scenes before the camera, and moving among photography, sculpture, and performance. Her work can also be compared with Yasumasa Morimura’s use of the body to construct images that refer to existing paintings and films^*9.

Katayama’s place in photographic history does not rest on inventing staged photography or pictorial composition. It rests on what she brings into those forms. Where earlier staged photographs constructed roles or events, Katayama places clothing made to fit her body, prosthetic legs, medical equipment, hand-sewn doubles, and mirror images within the same frame. These objects do not serve as background information about the figure. They support and dress the body in daily life and sometimes appear as bodies in their own right. Katayama has made self-portraiture a means of showing how a disabled woman’s body appears within particular clothes, devices, spaces, and ways of looking.

Katayama’s work is held by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Mori Art Museum, and Tate, among other institutions, and she participated in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019^*3*4. The selection of both GIFT and her Venice presentation for the 45th Kimura Ihei Photography Award also indicates recognition of her complete method: making objects, arranging them, and presenting them across pages and exhibition space, as well as producing the final photograph^*24.