Stomach Ache
2021 – ongoing
Lead Researcher
Stomach Ache at The Big Anxiety Festival Naarm, October 2022.
An artistic research project that engages people and their guts with experimental forms of creativity and curating. Stomach Ache has developed from my own lived experiences of living with a chronically dysregulated gut.
The gut and microbiome loom large in the popular imagination, and have been at the fore of new understandings of mental distress and behaviour change. But complex, chronic and imprecisely diagnosed gut issues are rising exponentially around the globe.
How does this widespread digestive dysregulation reveal gaps between advanced science and lived experience? Can dysregulated guts provoke new methods for representing lived experience in art and curating? As curators and artists with unseen disability and chronic health issues, can we represent lived experiences in ways that don’t simply reproduce our own?
Between 2021-2023 I was funded by University of Melbourne to host a series of art workshops and conversations with people with chronic, complex and imprecisely diagnosed gut health issues.
In 2023 I was awarded, with Rachel Marsden (University of the Arts, London), a NNMHR New Networks Grant to develop an international network for artists and curators focused on digestive dysregulation as a provocation to new curatorial and artistic methods. The network will launch in 2024 and we are keen to hear from artists and curators working with guts and/or lived experience. Please reach out info@vanessabartlett.com
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Stomach Ache at The Big Anxiety 2022. -
Dysphagiac by Lindsay Kelley, Stomach Ache workshop 2022. -
Stomach Ache workshop October 2022. -
Dysphagiac by Lindsay Kelley (Detail). Stomach Ache workshop, October 2022. -
Dysphagiac by Lindsay Kelley (Detail). Stomach Ache workshop, October 2022. -
Dysphagiac by Lindsay Kelley (Detail). Stomach Ache workshop, October 2022.
Images from the Stomach Ache workshop at The Big Anxiety Festival Naarm, 2022. Photographs by Julianne Bell.
Amelia Hine 2022. Moving image artwork commissioned for the Stomach Ache project website.
Collaborators: Kathy High, Lindsay Kelley, Claire Hooker, Rachel Marsden, Chamara Basnayake
Funders: University of Melbourne McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of Melbourne Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Research Initiative, Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research New Networks Grant (Funded by The Wellcome Trust and administrated by Durham University)
Link: to the project website
Related projects:
Gutsy Women
I live and work on Bidjigal and Gadigal land. I pay my respects to custodians past, present and emerging by revering the land and paying the rent. Always was, always will be.