This thesis sprouts from the embodied experience of struggling to “digest” the world - coping with it, on macro as well as micro levels. Processing experiences and emotions, images and information, buffering shocks, filtering out noise. I use my stomach – home to my cherished intuition as well as a painful and frustrating irritable bowel syndrome – and the food it can't properly digest as a metaphor for living in the world, meaning having to process and react to challenging external stimuli, navigating a harsh environment while inhabiting a sensitive body. 

Thoughts from various writers are sampled and gathered in an associative way to form a bundle of ideas relating to the body, sickness, care, feminism, ecology, queer theory, neurodiverse theory, the more-than-human-world, art history, wool and natural dyeing. Together the text scraps form chunks or clusters, visualizing the way a body absorbs fragments of information and then tries to make sense of it all. The shape of the text references the peristaltic movement of the bowels. 

The book is structured as a cycle, flowing organically from one part to another, underlining the interconnectedness of the discussed themes. The cycle is multilayered: the creative process is brought in relation to the process of digestion, as well as the cyclical nature of the lunar calendar. There are twelve sections or chapters, each one representing a month and a next step in the digestive and/or creative process. The starting point is a body on the verge of implosion, almost shutting down due to overwhelm. Then, the body of the book is entered, going through the skin, under the surface, into the stomach, the bowels. Through the sequence of the book, the bulk is gradually broken down into digestible pieces. 

The layering of the cycles underlines the fact that something can be multiple things at once, which fits into a larger worldview that avoids binary, simplistic thinking and values fluidity and ambiguity. I am interested in the interaction between bodies and their environments, the blurred boundaries between what is considered inside and outside. I use the terms masking and unmasking to think about these relationships, about showing and hiding. In my practice I explore the act of masking – through coats, enclosures – as a way of taking care, comforting, sheltering, shielding oneself. I also think about ways in which masking can be harmful: what is being masked that should be unmasked? With the help of the different sources, I dig up and uncover underlying, societal, systemic sources of pain, distress and the difficulty of digesting the world.