Kirsty Hendry

Losing my head, following my heart, listening to my gut and other body languages. Opening my mouth and letting my belly rumble.

Ventriloquism—speaking in the belly—was not originally an entertainers trick but rather a rumbling sort of prophetic internal speech. Gut feelings? The gut is often referred to as our ‘second brain’—the gut, like the mind, processes information, ruminates, takes in, takes up, absorbs, assimilates, consumes. Long before it came to describe a biological function, ‘digest’ was used to denote a collection of writing—condensed versions of ideas of distributed elsewhere.

Through archival research, writing, and experiments in moving image, Kirsty Hendry will explore science’s predilection for fiction. During the residency, Kirsty will be thinking about text as a digested thing, a metabolic process. Reading is necessary for writing— material to be broken down, recouped and reconstituted in new forms, one material assimilated into another. How might digestion provide a metaphor for living in a world that can not be categorised into binaries?