Kate Coe Temnomeroff

A developing short film and cross-disciplinary project

Inheritance: A Woman's Portrait in Pieces
is a developing short film and multidisciplinary project exploring legacy, memory, and emotional inheritance through a distinctly feminine lens.

Rooted in my family's history of cultural displacement, internal immigration, internal migration, and exile, this work weaves together symbolic still life, poetic voiceover, and vintage materials to ask: What remains when nothing tangible survives?

This page accompanies my application to Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice programme. It brings together early experiments and foundational materials for Inheritance: A Woman's Portrait in Pieces — a poetic artist film rooted in textile memory, cross-generational lineage, and voice-led authorship.

As this work develops, it will shape future screenings, exhibitions, and collaborations. The film is imagined as both an artwork and an offering — a space for reflection, remembrance, and the quiet voices carried through cloth, gesture, and inherited memory.

You are warmly invited to explore this living archive — an intimate space of unfolding ideas.

Inheritance in Detail: A Textile Study Across Exile and Time

This gallery presents selected textile fragments from my family archive — delicate remnants of garments once worn by the women in my maternal line. Dating back to before the Russian Revolution, each piece bears the mark of a history shaped not only by elegance, but by rupture: revolution, Soviet life, wartime scarcity, and generational silence.

These are not simply heirlooms. They are quiet survivors — fragments that outlived the women who wore them, and the worlds they inhabited. Preserved across borders and decades, they hold gestures of care, adaptation, and identity that were rarely spoken aloud.

As Inheritance: A Woman's Portrait in Pieces unfolds, these materials become central. This project is not only about learning to craft an artist-led film — it is also about re-entering history through the act of dressing. Textile observation becomes narrative; garment-making becomes performance.

Some pieces will appear in the film. Others will guide the construction of garments I stitch and wear on camera, reviving ancestral gesture through cinematic presence. This process shifts me from instinctive image-making to a more embodied, research-led practice — transforming fragments of private domestic history and wartime endurance into tools for creative renewal.

Sheer and weightless, this fragment evokes vanished elegance. Its ruffled tiers likely adorned a sleeve or hem. Now it teaches me how softness can hold shape — and how gesture becomes memory in motion.

Midnight velvet edged in pale floral embroidery — a study in contrast and restraint. It sharpens my eye to how ornament survives even under restriction.

Fragile, almost floral netting that likely once framed a neckline or veil. Studying its rhythm deepens my understanding of repetition and care, especially in garments made during austerity.

A softened textile with hand-sewn floral and ornamental forms — a quiet domestic language passed through revolution, war, and silence.

Lustrous and resilient, this wide ribbon may have cinched a waist or adorned a winter coat. It teaches me how fabric carries intention — and how drape can convey both elegance and endurance.

Delicately twisted and intricate, this strand of beads feels intimate in scale. I study it not just for pattern, but for rhythm — a thread of ritual that persists across upheaval.

This rough tangle of stitched beads speaks of survival. Beauty made durable through war and displacement.

Small but commanding, this thimble is worn from use. I include it as both relic and symbol — of labour, invisibility, and the quiet persistence of making through scarcity and exile.

A single ornamental button. Small, symbolic — a reminder that even colour can carry inheritance.

Stacked like prayers, these faded thread cards are among the most touching objects I own. They hold potential — of garments unfinished, or garments lost. In recreating them, I honour what was interrupted.

Women of the Lineage: Portraits as Patterns

This slideshow presents portraits of women from my maternal line — each serving as a visual reference for Inheritance: A Woman's Portrait in Pieces, where I will reconstruct three garments drawn from this archive.

These images are not just family records; they are working studies. The cut of a sleeve, the fall of a collar, the weight of a trim — each detail informs my understanding of material language, silhouette, and gesture.

The reconstructed garments — a lace gown, an embellished bodice, and a richly detailed day dress — will be made and worn on camera. These are not nostalgic replicas, but acts of research and remembrance, grounding the film in lived history and embodied authorship.

Why Meditations?

These meditations are part of my creative process. They offer space for reflection — not separate from the work, but embedded within it.

Spoken aloud, they help me listen inwardly: to test tone, rhythm, and emotional undercurrents as I develop the project. They guide my voice toward calmness, clarity, and presence — qualities I wish to transmit in the film itself.

They are also a gentle form of public engagement. These recordings invite pause and stillness, echoing the themes that shape my practice: memory, inheritance, and emotional continuity.

As I explore voiceover and sound design, the meditations become a test site for pacing, intimacy, and atmosphere. They're not performances, but offerings — soft, reflective, and evolving alongside the work.

About this Video: "In the Space Between" — A Journal Flip-Through with Voiceover

This short video offers a glimpse into In the Space Between — a hand-stitched journal exploring memory, displacement, and personal inheritance..

Built from found objects and simbolic fragments, each page reflects the emotional foundations of my wider practice. The voiceover — written and spoken by me — explores silence, identity, and the quiet presence of objects that remember on our behalf.

This video is shared to offer a direct sense of my process: its rhythm, atmosphere, and narrative tone as I move toward voice-led, time-based work.

Inheritance — A Continuation of Legacy

Inheritance: A Woman's Portrait in Pieces builds directly upon the foundation laid by The Joys of Life Before the Red Plague, deepening the personal and artistic inquiry into the aftershocks of revolution, the rupture of belonging, and the intimate work of remembering. Where the earlier exhibition illuminated the grandeur and intimacy of aristocratic life before the fall, Inheritance enters a more fragmented, embodied realm — one shaped by loss, reinvention, and the lingering texture of what was never fully spoken.