On Being Ill
Digital Exhibition

| By Aafke van Pelt | The one time I managed to render my therapist completely lost for words was when I told her I felt guilty asking anyone to be close with me, because it was “like handing someone a pile of exhausting diagnoses and telling them: ‘well, look, I never managed to love this, but perhaps you could give it a try?’”. My therapist looked genuinely sad. Perhaps a bit desperate. She was very sweet, my therapist. She really helped me. I felt a bit sorry for her. I ca

| By Mima Stanulov | I measure my strength in my own units twenty-two steps no handrail three half-full grocery bags fifty meters of brisk walking before my legs lock seven squats — my knees buckle on a good day, nine after ten sentences my handwriting tilts into italics I count thirty-six springs I feel seventy-six winters

| By Angela Wye | INSOMNIA Move on. Move on you urge the mind when sleepless there is awful space to churn and turn on what is done or not during the day that’s gone. Move on. Move on you urge the mind when sleepless there is awful space to vocalize and sweat distress as painful memories deny you calm. Move on. Move on you urge the mind when only able to quell the night agonies of your restless body and tangled bedding by switching on the light.

| By Jess Rippengale | I have been listening to author Katherine May's podcast ‘The Clearing’, where she invites guests to discuss their fantasy retreat. It's an anything goes opportunity and in the same way I have agonised over which eight tracks I would take to a desert island (because of course, one day I will be asked onto the programme, just after appearing on the now defunct Top of the Pops), I have been planning my own retreat, in preparation for Katherine's invite. S

| By Genevieve Rudd | My winter body bends and twists As the rigor mortis sets in, Baclofen eases the tensioners, Swaddled under a canopy Sunken into the mattress litter. Mulch from industrial white linen, That's not a blanket, it’s a counterpane, Counter this pain with the ease of afternoon sunlight casting shadows across horizons – making me take up more space than i’m allocated in my curtain draped plot, not a bed rot but nesting in recuperation, soft and eased cotton and

| By Nicolette Clara | THE THEATRE OF ILLNESS constructed set up laying here exposed in a dark room living in a photograph cut up and spliced developing as a negative on room floor suffering art with wet wounds the perfect patient pristine model in clinical white a pierrot in cold linen ON PSYCHOSIS Cotard’s seedlings sowing growing wild never listen to the wind blowing whispers you are not dead organs are living breathing organisms organising you are not empty just sensi

| By Sanne Kabalt |

| By Elisabeth Deák | Form is, in the end, death. Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life. – Paul Klee Liminal: From the Latin limen, ‘threshold, cross-piece, sill.’ A state somewhere on the spectrum of presence and absence, operating between one stage – one solid shape – and another. An in-between. Unclear, transitional being. The yuck in the chrysalis as the former caterpillar melts to gel. In anthropology, liminality refers to the stage in a rite of passage wh

| By Christina Lee | In the court of illnesses, I wear no crown upon my head. In fact, I am suited most often in my pajamas, preferring the soft comforts offered to me by polyester when pain radiates underneath my skin and picks at my joints. But I dress up this day. I put on pants of a stiffer denim-cotton and a white wrapped blouse, a bit austere for my recent usual taste, place sunglasses in my sightline that brush against just blackened lashes. It briefly feels as if

By Rro Novak "Because she hadn't learned to be disabled yet," writes Danish, disabled poet Caspar Eric in his book Nike, and I think: Yes, I haven't learned that either. I have spent years scavenging tools to support me when things fell apart again and again. Most days I stood with nothing but duct tape and zip ties in my hands, trying to build a barricade against a life that seemed to come at me like a freight train laden with gifts I had neither asked for nor understood. Du

| By Filio Chasioti | The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and lavender, silent and still, disrupted only by rhythmic breathing. Kira watched the dust dance in a beam of light. In the corner, Sam worked on the machine. He was checking the wires, as he usually did, in passing, making sure everything was plugged in. “She thinks I’m the captain,” Sam said. He pointed to the monitor screen. “She told me the crew was ready. She said the weather was bad.” Kira did not answer. She wa