Sickness in the Sacristy

Sickness in the Sacristy was a solo show that took place in Saltspace Gallery in 2022. By situating materiality as rooted in bodily experience, this exhibition explored processes of the body that leaks, flows, excretes and throws up. Through focusing on my upbringing within the Catholic Church and a personal connection to mediumship, the work considered ideas of digestion, food and body fluids in relation to religious rituals and Spiritualist séances. Historical information weaved in and out of autobiographical content, allowing stories to exist simultaneously across vast periods of time while examining how an autobiographical voice can challenge hierarchies of knowledge. 

The central text within this exhibition also seeked to understand the place of class and gender in relation to these histories, which invokes consideration of the witch. Necromancers, Spiritualists and witches all pose a challenge to established ideas of order and rationality and demonstrate the incompatibility of magic and capitalist productivity. Sickness in the Sacristy also explored notions of truth while using occult methodologies to investigate an ongoing relationship between writing, language and the production of objects.

Photographs by Jack Allan

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A review of the show by Hayley Jane Dawson for MAP Magazine can be read here