Falling through space (holding on) | Cyanotype, Bloodwood Tree Sap, Copper Oxide Ink, Salt, Watercolour and Graphite on Tracing Paper | 42 cm x 29.7 cm | 2024.

Holding On is part of Falling Through Space, an ongoing body of biomorphic artworks that explore trauma, bodily memory, and transformation through ecological material processes. Emerging from vivid hallucinatory recollections of the body in motion—adrift, suspended, and endlessly falling—the work translates internal experiences of rupture into sensorial, organic forms. These shifting landscapes blur the boundaries between body and environment, memory and matter, becoming sites where trauma is held, released, and reconfigured.

Katie Harris-MacLeod’s practice is grounded in embodied experience, investigating the intersections between personal trauma, ecological systems, and material transformation. Informed by lived experience of family violence, her work considers how patterns of domination enacted upon women and children are mirrored in the exploitation of the natural world. Through this lens, bodily and ecological violence are understood as interconnected forms of rupture, each leaving traces on bodies, landscapes, and collective memory.

Created with hand-processed inks derived from plant matter, tree pigments, and ochres, Holding On uses material as both medium and witness. The dispersal of pigment across paper maps an intimate conversation with place—capturing residues of deep time, environmental change, and embodied memory. Tree marks, mineral traces, and plant scores become a form of ecological documentation, registering both fragility and resilience in the Anthropocene.

When activated by light, the work shifts—becoming a luminous, almost animate presence. This subtle transformation gestures toward the persistence of what is unseen or suppressed: memory that continues to live within the body, and within the land. The glow suggests a threshold state—between visibility and concealment, rupture and repair—where something fragile continues to endure.

Through this process, drawing becomes an act of somatic repair: a way of releasing fragmented memory through embodied making. In Holding On, organic matter carries the imprint of trauma and transformation, holding tension between dissolution and regeneration, and proposing that healing—like ecology—is relational, contingent, and ongoing.