Katherine Martin

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Umbilicus

This body of work reflects upon the painful yet ubiquitous feminine journey toward meeting thyself. It emerged out of a need to comprehend familial relationships and the ways in which my matriarchal history has fundamentally shaped my spiritual being. It is a gentle dissection of my feminine body, and of complex collective and personal memories and histories often steeped in violence, abuse and mental illness. In navigating my own emotional and sexual trauma, I have found solace in unpacking the violent histories embedded within my matriarchal line – working through verbal and physical archives as a way through which to connect with those who have suffered before me. This work explores the crucial interrelation between transgenerational trauma, corporeal memory and affectivity. It leverages traumatic affects to unpack the contradictions, shortcomings, strengths, and ultimately the powerful plurality within, and of, the feminine experience respectively.

Umbilicus, 2025, is most abstractly, made up of memory containers and filled with an abundance of imagined artefacts that draw from childhood memories that make visible the mechanics of transgenerational trauma. Whilst unravelling materials imbued with personal histories, I engage with congenital crafts of sewing and embroidery as ways through which to engender resistance and unearth unresolved trauma. I have chosen to work intimately with cotton cloth and satin to create forms inspired by inherited fabrics such as brocade, pieces of embroidered material, lace and the fabric from opulent ballgowns owned by my grandmother, as a way through which the harness a tangible exploration of a painful familial history. 

The work calls into question normative feminine aesthetics and ways of being that my grandmother so often imposed onto my conception of “woman.” Throughout each fabric component run multitudinous gathered lines that set the fabric into textured folds. It is within these folds that we can uncover complex bodily memories. They are too, representative of the physical body and of its skin, cells and form. There is an embedded tension within the work. Each cord becomes a restrictive and constrictive mechanism that reflects upon laden feminine expectations. 

The work reminds us that the metaphorical umbilical cord to the mother cannot be severed. It continues to work as the intangible and spiritual vehicle through which trauma and life patterns are inherited. It is through my matrilineal relationships that my understanding of the feminine experience was shaped.

I come to apprehend this inherited mass of wounded memory through porous, viscous and saturated conditions. Umbilicus considers the leaky body as a means to articulate the entrenched nature of intergenerational trauma and the ways in which our uncontained spill disrupts patriarchal structures. The work exemplifies the encumbered yet necessary return to the womb. Numerous fabric bodies and tapestries throughout the installation are sculpted, dipped and coated in bee’s wax. The wax has been melted into the ruffled, draped and stuffed fabric as a means of both preserving history and manifesting a leaky representation of matriarchal trauma. These oozing sculptural works are a visual embodiment of the matriarchal body amidst a spill. Each piece is much like a wound that fails to stop seeping. By profusely leaking and spilling, I reclaim parts of the shame entangled within the feminine experience.

This body of work is an imagined space rooted in a desire for an alternative state of affairs in which I hope to bear witness to my feminine body stepping into the discomfort of both acknowledging and resisting inherited trauma – transforming sexual wounds into affects from which to draw strength and engender the start of my healing journey.

Umbilicus explores the way in which I embrace my feminine experience as being precarious yet multi-dimensional and fundamentally whole.