Scottish Gut Project | A Digest

Join us for an evening of moving image, readings, discussion, and endless digestive puns to launch a series of new works resulting from The Scottish Gut Project—an interdisciplinary research project exploring (and challenging) the politics underpinning the mind-body divide and identifying new strategies for understanding and communicating the role the gut plays both biologically and culturally in our lives.

A Digest brings together the launch of Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut by Elsa Richardson and Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine by Manon Mathias, alongside the premier of Human Nature —a new moving image work by Scottish Gut Project artist Kirsty Hendry.

The screening and readings, will be followed by a Digestif (i.e. drinks reception) and a long table discussion with Q&A, where Elsa, Manon, and Kirsty will be joined by researcher and curator Rachel Marsden of the Stomach Ache project.

The Scottish Gut Project was instigated by Dr Manon Mathias (University of Glasgow) and Dr Elsa Richardson (University of Strathclyde) in 2021 exploring the mind-gut relationship from an arts and humanities perspective. Bringing together people with lived experience of gut disorders and health conditions alongside historians and cultural scholars and researchers from medicine and nutrition to destabilise the body politics of the mind-body divide, the project aimed to identify new strategies for improved communication of gut conditions and their impact on psychological wellbeing.

Stomach Ache is a project led by Dr Vanessa Bartlett (University of Melbourne) and Dr Rachel Marsden (University of the Arts London) that explores ways of representing the brain-gut-microbiome axis in curatorial and artistic practice to highlight the gaps between cutting-edge science and everyday lived experience.