Rewilding Bodies: A Celebratory Exploration of Resilience and Transformation Through Illness

Artist: Cathy Rowsome

Assistant: Eileen Shaughnessy

 

 

“I have heard it said that illness is an attempt to escape the truth. I suspect it is actually an attempt to embody the whole truth, to remember all of ourselves.”

 

"Illness remains a wilderness… it may play an important, even necessary, role in the ecology of the whole”

 

Kat Duff, Alchemy of Illness

 

What causes chronic illnesses? Are they simply an inability of the body to adapt to environmental factors and injury? Might they be more than a failure of the organism to adapt, might they be an important source of knowledge and an opening for spiritual transformation? Is the increasing prevalence of chronic illness in our times simply a result of ecosystem breakdown and widespread presence of toxic contaminants in the environment, or is it also one way the voice of the earth is directing us how to heal ourselves? Through talking with four chronically ill women and non-binary folks, we explore these questions.

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Click through the tabs under 'visual'- Cathy, Asha, Toni and Jackie- to reead interviews and view work.