"…the most beautiful description of the sourdough is the Spanish word, “masa madre” which is the “mother dough”. When a daughter in the past was going to get married, she received a piece of the mother dough with her in order to feed her family.” Karl De Smedt, The Puratos World Heritage Sourdough Library

Mother Dough is a photographic series capturing Amato’s 83-year-old mother holding dough as it slips through her fingers, forming momentary sculptures that only the camera can preserve. What seems like a futile attempt to grasp the material reveals, through photography, the dough’s agency, morphing between forms that evoke the sensual, the fragile, and the human. Some shapes suggest the erotic or maternal: a fleeting resemblance to genitalia or a small body suspended between her hands. These transient gestures reflect the cyclical nature of creation and decay, echoing the “masa madre” or “mother dough” tradition, in which a daughter receives a piece of her mother’s starter to sustain her own family. Mother Dough becomes both an homage and a meditation on aging, inheritance, and the continuous, slippery exchange between life and death.