An Edinburgh Medical School 300 showcase exhibition
Umbilical Phantoms is an exhibition of paintings and a birthing chair by Sam Sharma exploring embodied memory and reflections on pregnancy and childbirth. The works stemmed from the artist’s desire to examine her own experience and reflect on the transformations and interconnectedness of pregnancy and early motherhood, alongside an interest in cultural and institutional attitudes to birth. Contributing to contemporary conversations around the representation of matrescence (the time of mother-becoming), they convey powerful, visceral experience, reverence and tenderness. Situated within the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the exhibition foregrounds the maternal body in a space that is dedicated to innovative discourse and meeting the complex challenges of our rapidly changing times. It also engages with the building’s history as the site of a former general and maternity hospital, and the artist’s personal history as the place of her medical training. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a paper by the interdisciplinary writer and thinker Siri Hustvedt.
Sam Sharma is a painter and printmaker. She has an enduring interest in the body as a site of knowledge. Her enquiry engages with the life cycle, physical and psychic transitions, and the interplay of internal and external worlds, exploring how the embodied experience of drawing and painting can come close to expressing these states.
Sam is also a medical doctor with experience in general practice and palliative care. She took a break from medicine to focus on her art practice in 2022, completing an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art in 2025.
For more information about Sam’s work visit www.samanthasharma.art
