A multimedia installation by K Shields, exploring our difficult and messy relationship with our guts

Enter an immersive landscape where the internal meets the external creating a liminal space between our bodies and the world outside

[An] analogy for the digestive system would be a dense, teeming, and enchanted forest that borders two worlds within a single ecosystem, a transition zone between what we call the world and what we call our bodies - Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya & Raj Patel

GUTS (The Enchanted Forest) is a presentation of research and work in progress by artist K Shields in which they use sculpture, projection, photography, 3D modelling and sound to confront our relationship with our guts. Using this messy, unloved but critical metres-long organ to explore questions of queerness, of nature and artifice, of well and unwellness, and the necessity of finding balance between the communities that sustain us internally and those that sustain us externally.

GUTS is an ongoing project featuring multimedia manifestations referencing the artist’s lived experience of Ulcerative Colitis, a long term chronic health condition affecting the large intestine.

This stage of the project was developed alongside the Sussex Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex during a three-month artist residency. It was supported by Laurence Hill, digital art curator and visiting research fellow in the Lab.

About the Artist

K Shields (any pronouns) is an artist living and working in Brighton, making process-driven work in a diverse range of media.

Often using references to queer aesthetics and culture, K’s work aims to escape the trappings of normative identities, gender, and physical and mental health difficulties.

Through the systematic documentation and recording of body-based experiences - movement and stillness, grief and anxiety, illness and recovery - K creates mixed media work with the digital/physical body that expresses the desire to survive, process and move forward.