SICKNESS IN THE SACRISTY by Megan Rudden

By situating materiality as rooted in bodily experience, SICKNESS IN THE SACRISTY explores the processes of the body that leaks, flows, excretes and throws up. Through focusing on her upbringing within the Catholic Church and a personal connection to mediumship, Megan considers ideas of digestion, food and body fluids in relation to religious rituals and spiritualist seances. Historical information weaves 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 seeks 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. Megan explores notions of truth and uses occult methodologies to investigate an ongoing relationship between writing, language and the production of objects.

Photographs by Jack Allan and Hannah Absalom