Collection: Materia
Waugh was the recipient of Antenna Gallery's 2025 Louisiana Solo Exhibition, for which she created Materia.
The use of plants in support of fertility outcomes is ancient and contemporary. The plants included in this show are chewed, and made into teas, tinctures and pessaries to block, disrupt, disorganize, constrict, contract, stimulate, soften, allow. These are the uterine actions that induce miscarriage and abortion as well as birth.
Despite its long-standing utility, knowledge of herbal actions and formulas has been repeatedly attacked. The suppression and extraction of herbal medicine is a violent history of power and control. Midwives were called witches and burned at the stake. American slaveholders forbade enslaved women from keeping cotton root. They found hiding places. Knowledge was forced underground for its own protection.
Abortion policy in the United States originated as a solution to the problem of full ownership over Black womens’ bodies and everything they produced. Throughout the world and all of human history, laws governing bodily autonomy are tightened when those who dominate power desire more of it. We find ourselves in another lapsarian inflection point; anti-abortion culture continues to function as a means of biopower.
This body of work is the result of partnership with community herbal practitioners and abortion researchers and doulas. As part of our collaboration I kiln-sculpted glass into ephemeral forms to bring body to my partners’ research. We want to illustrate the beauty of our shadow work.
We invite you to spend time with the plants. We encourage you to engage with generational knowledge and published findings, that they might lead us to provide for ourselves.


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To curate or collect works from this exhibit, please contact caitlin@caitlinwaugh.com
You can purchase the companion book for Materia here