Umbilical or สายสะดือ (umbilical cord) explores the matrilineal connection between three generations of Thai women through a recorded phone conversation between my mother and I.

The female fetus is formed with all the eggs she will ever have in her entire life. This means that when my mother was a baby inside my grandmother's womb, the egg that would become me existed within my grandmother as well. In this way -- my grandmother, my mother and I once shared a single body.

Inspired by the multi-layered ways in which our bodies carry memories (genetically, events, emotional -- the list goes on), I wanted to explore how voices as part of a bodily expression might act as archives. I was curious about how it can reflect the relationship between speakers as well as their own individual histories, especially the intertwined memory of our once shared prenatal bodies in grandmother's. And finally, how the act of speaking of our late grandmother conjure too the presence of her body, the origin of us and yet no longer here while we still are.

The result was an intimate and layered vignette into the Thai women's experience, the diversity across generations, and how one generation’s experience affects the next.