V. Consumptive Chic

Tuberculosis took over during the 1800’s due to the sudden increase in overpopulated areas, propelled by urban centres. It was an inexplicable disease, plucking life from the previously rosy cheeked. The extreme devastation forced people to allegorise this sudden tide of death, making sense of it as tied up in a fatal elitism; Tuberculosis was framed as preferentially ailing those of a ‘creative mind.’

Dating back almost 9,000 years, and still remaining one of the leading causes of death from a single infectious agent - the reality of things was usurped by a tale of artistic bounty. A disease for the refined and the illuminated, this framing of Tuberculosis quickly infiltrated culture and the arts, Dickens describing it as the “dread disease” which “refines” death. Charlotte Brontë compounded this, musing “consumption, I’m aware, is a flattering disease,” when talking of her sister Anne who later died of the illness. Charlotte was in fact the only Brontë sibling who escaped death in this way.

Much like the heroin chic of the early 2000s, women of the Romantic period wanted to mimic the glamour associated with “consumptive chic” (as coined by historian Carolyn Day). Rouge was applied to imitate feverishness, the skin painted with arsenic, lead and mercury to replicate an anemic skin tone, and many women dropped the deadly nightshade, Belladonna, into their eyes to cause their pupils to dilate. The look was completed with a skeletal frame, with 1840s fashion trends promoting fragility and minuscule waistlines.

Consumptives were allegorically aligned with spiritual purity, extreme female beauty, and for men…the tortured genius. Literature and art of the time reflected the ubiquity of the disease, with consumptive characters present in Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Les Miserables.

VI. TB or not TB

The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (the arty fuckboys of the 1850s) were busy popularising this image of hauntingly fragile female beauty. Their gaunt models were consumptive in look and evocative of a sensuality that can only be considered necrophiliac.

Read more

The past month has seen London dwellers strung out aimlessly amongst the parched grass and weeping trees, not even pretending to wiggle their computer mouse, daydreaming about the feeling of rain on skin.

July has been and gone, and the majority of my consumption has been out of doors. Electrolytes, smiling at strangers, and plenty of peaches are the main takeaways from this month’s check up.

Listen:

The Clearing, Wolf Alice - Makes for a rather euphoric girlhood-affirming summertime album listen. This has been on repeat in my ears.

Richard Gadd on How To Fail [podcast] - My mother recommended this podcast as an antidote to crippling perfectionism and the anxiety that comes with that. It’s surprisingly effective.

Read:

The Outrun, Amy Liptrot - this delicate yet frankly written memoir straddles the harsh realities of Liptrot’s struggle with addiction, with nature writing. Each chapter of the book explores the push and pull of her rural identity and the impact of her homeland on how she experienced the landscape of London in her twenties.

Watch:

Cleansed [Almeida Theatre]- exceedingly not for the faint of heart, Sarah Kane’s gruelling play left me in tears. The sheer feat of producing this play in a vaguely accessible way is impressive enough, notwithstanding the sheer physicality and stamina of the company. Approximately 5678 trigger warnings and for good reason. Whilst others walked out, I was strangely moved.

People - I have been shamelessly people-watching lately, and it has led to some lovely interactions with strangers.

Readings - there are so many hot literary events in London right now; it feels like a very exciting scene to be part of - the demand is symptomatic of craving IRL connection. There’s something so magical about being sat in a room fully of people watching and listening to words as their writer intended them to be spoken.

Eat:

Peaches - at their peak season right now, these have replaced my daily apple.

Beef shin ragu - wildly inappropriate given current weather but nevertheless this dish was the absolutely phenomenal final result of a pasta making class I went to last week. Ever more successful given that Nonna was plying us with vats of wine.

Drink:

Damm Lemon - at only 3%, I can only describe this drink as nectar from whichever gods you believe in the most.

Do:

Play rounders in the park - huge shoutout to my neighbour Paul for providing my friends and I with the kit. We felt like boisterous school kids in P.E, vivaciously debating the rules and keeping score.

Overtake lime bikes on a manual - These days I find myself unable to cycle anywhere without absolutely razzing it, and though I generate more sweat than I’d like, the smugness of overtaking e-bike commuters is incomparable.

Go camping - Lightyears away from home, from any urban comfort, time in nature renders any troubles or anxieties pathetic and meaningless.

Play matchmaker - I hosted a dinner party and people kissed. It just goes to show that IRL flirting is so back.

Don’t:

Cut your own fringe.

until next month,

Your practitioner Anna Ticehurst

In his 17th century poem ‘The Vine’, Robert Herrick describes an erotic dream about the poet entwining his body around his ‘dainty Lucia’, her ‘belley, buttocks, and her waist,’ before waking, finding:

‘(ah me!) this flesh of mine

More like a stock than like a vine’.

A similar sentiment is shared by rapper J Cole in his - albeit less subtly named - 2015 song ‘Wet Dreamz’:

‘Wet dreamin’, thinkin’ that I’m smashin’ but I’m sleepin’.’

This unlikely pair of wordsmiths are kindred spirits, bound across centuries by their shared unwanted erections and nighttime fantasies.

Read more

Dear Patient,

June flew by in a flurry of social engagements and creative projects. The sickly heat of this summer has made it’s bed, and we’re all lying in it. With sweaty lips and flushed cheeks, wet behind the knees; we find ourselves deep in July.

I apologise for the delayed prescription this month, and do hope the vitamin D has been a salve in the interim. Cultural remedies don’t have major withdrawal symptoms, so please don’t be alarmed, but I’d recommend doubling down on the following if you are hoping to make it through until August.

Listen:

Fey Fili - Her folky tones have been filling my studio with a welcome yearning and melancholia.

Fiona Apple, The First Taste.

GWA, Joan Snyder (Podcast) - I have been painting towards a show for the last few months, and I love to listen to other painters talk whilst I am alone in the studio. To have their company feels energising. At one moment, Snyder revealed she knew the composer Phillip Glass as he used to be her plumber in New York before he became successful. A very interesting interview.

Read:

To the River, Olivia Liang - I’ve been loving this more than I ever thought I could love a book about a river. I’m so caught up in a fascination with the relationships between people and their psychological landscapes, that I am rarely drawn to literature about nature. Yet, Liang beautifully showcases how nothing exists in isolation, the river is a rich psychological landscape of its own.

Olivia Liang is one of those writers who is lamented so much, her name batted around with reverence, that I almost felt I already knew what she was about. That her words couldn’t surprise me. Reading To the River, she’s caused me to feel nostalgically emotional for the British countryside. She takes us on her journey as she walks the River Ouse in Sussex. Extremely schooled on the landscape, she is in constant conversation with the plants and animals that surround her. Her route is interspersed with lyrical reveries into the histories, and mythologies that scar the landscape. Within a single chapter, she discusses the numerous flora and fauna and their significance within the landscape and beyond, the famous battle between Simon de Montfort and Henry III - and the 2,000 soldiers who died in the Ouse trying to flee - which then flows into musings on Virginia Woolf who lived by the river and died too, by its waters.

Transcription, Ben Lerner - A really interesting and quick read looking at our over dependence on technology. Lerner weaves his intelligence into his characters, their dialogue surprising and deeply moving; ranging from topics of quantum mechanics, to eating disorders, to the psychology of dreams.

Eat:

Soft serve. I also Deliveroo’d a single serving of frozen yogurt to my sofa the other day, which I would highly recommend.

Do:

IRL flirting - lean into the erotics that can’t be subsumed to the online space. I prescribe pheromones, eye contact, and a surprising (maybe even shockingly unexpected) crush.

Flipflops - Get your toes out.

Morning Pages - cliched, but I’ve discovered like most things, it is for a reason. I’ve been trying to output more than I ingest (even though I am of course privy to a morning scroll). Getting dreams and worries and thoughts onto the page first thing is a nice return to self after the disorienting experience of sleep.

Until next month,

Your practitioner, Anna Morrissey.

- Mariana Lemos, Curator

Curators of Flare Up - a major group show at Goldsmith’s CCA, on until August 16th, 2026 - Mariana Lemos and Natasha Hoare speak to Sicknote about creating the first expansive showcase of sick and disabled artists within the UK.

Exploring the concepts and aesthetics of what is increasingly referred to as crip, Flare Up presents works by artists engaging with illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness. From conception to fruition, this exhibition pushes against the restrictively normative processes that dominate the art world. Lemos and Hoare explain why it was so important to them to curate an exhibition that enfolds concepts and requirements such as crip-time, captioning, audioguides, and access as a creative method, to offer a new and more humane way of working and engaging with art.

They begin by telling me about their own project entitled ‘sicknote,’

MARIANA LEMOS: It started as a program that was meant to be a series of events, but we’ve only been able to do one so far, so it was really nice to hear about your Sicknote. A lot of the texts we were reading around [illness] - people from Anne Boyer and Christina Sharpe, and other writers - had this diaristic or note taking form that seems to suit well the working from bed, or the fluctuating feelings or flare ups. You might write something today, and then a little bit tomorrow, it was more about the kind of everyday development or something and that embodied awareness of the day that we liked about the ‘sicknote.’

Read more

In anticipation of Tummy Ache Magazine’s Horny Issue (launching June 18th). Cleaning the Hardware is a horny tale by writer Eliza Shelley.

—

I cannot wake without a latte. I army crawl to the landing, tee myself up with the stairs and let my body slug down 15 steps, tit first. There are plastic tips on the ends of my fingers. The acrylics make me more feminine. The nail lady tells me long nails get you a boyfriend.

The milk frother’s got milk burnt onto the bottom of it. There’s a yellow crust round the suctioned lid. I put it to my nose and inhale deep. It smells like vomit. I stick my index finger in and start scraping at the burn with my acrylic nail. There, there, my sweet frother, mummy’s here. This is actually my mum’s house. Her boyfriend keeps frothing the milk without rinsing out the frother. Oaf. Fool. Lummox.

Mum’s house has a kitchen island made of stainless steel. It’s August and the house is sweltering but the island, holding in its stomach the fridge and the freezer, stays cold. I press my knee into the kitchen stall and haul myself onto its smooth surface. My belly button makes a suction noise as it connects with the metal. The steel takes my sticky heat away and gifts me a soft chill. Thermal equilibrium at last. I could be happy here. I press my cheekbones hard against the edge of the island, contouring my face up for the day ahead. Looksmaxx me, kitchen island. Make me wonderful.

“Jesus Libby-”

It’s Darren, Mum’s boyfriend. He shields his eyes but he’s peaking through the middle fingers. Mother dearest follows behind him,

“Libby put a top on no one wants to see your tiny tits”.

I sit on the edge of the island and fold my arms across my chest. It’s not a fair fight. Mine are made from fleshy tissue and hers are made of silicone gel. Does she even remember Dad buying her those perky D-cup tits? They’re pretty wonderful. The coffee is done anyway. I pick it up and walk past Mother dearest. I stop at Darren. Close enough I can feel his arm hairs on my stomach. I put my mouth to his ear, whispering,

“Don’t forget to wipe down the milk frother. It was filthy this morning”.

I attend reformer pilates 4 times a week to stay rigid. Softness of the body could become softness of the mind you see. I like sliding up and down on the reformer machine. The footbar pressing against my feet, my head cushioned between the shoulder blocks. I thrust my hips high, high into the sky and pulse, ladies pulse, ten more. We tilt our hips up and up, fucking the sky. My favourite part comes at the end of the class. I grab the black spray bottle. I make a ball of blue tissue roll from the dispenser. I spray my reformer down from top to bottom. I get on my hands and knees and wipe down every inch of her. The head rest, the shoulder pads, the hand straps, foot straps, carriage, each spring. I bend over the foot-bar and wipe backwards and forwards until I hear her squeak and catch her metal glinting in the mid-morning sun. The women from my class are long gone and the next class are hovering, waiting for me to stop scrubbing at my machine. The next woman lies down as I leave, ready to hurt herself. My reformer connects with flesh once again. Ruined.

I’m working the closing shift at the cinema. I’m frequently reminded it’s a customer facing role. I stay back with the hardware. A customer with big fat ears orders a flat white from my colleague. I take the portafilter out of the machine and smack it against the grounds tray. Fill it to the brim with freshly ground coffee and load her up. My colleague comes up next to me and touches my machine.

“I’m doing it already,” I tell her.

“Ohhh, thanks so much. With oat milk yah hun”, in her twee international school accent.

The oat milk screams in the pitcher. I’m burning it a little. It bubbles over the side and runs onto the back of my hand. I turn to the customer and hold eye contact as I pour the milk into the mug and lick the oaty goodness off the back of my hand. Customer-facing role. It’s important to wipe down the steam wand, so I moisten the yellow cloth and give him a tight little handjob with dynamic wrist action. I spin the dial full throttle, purging the wand as I was taught, and it blows steam out of its tip.

There’s a slow period from five to six o’ clock. I lean against the cocktail counter. The international school girl is leaning against the fridge on her phone. The radio crackles. It’s my manager who’s sitting on a spinny chair some two floors below.

“Team, if there’s time for leaning there’s time for deep cleaning.”

Read more

The month of May bore witness to torrential downpours and sticky heat, literally and - of course - metaphorically speaking. Amidst such chaotic undulations, I’ve found myself seeking solitude, stillness, and ‘silence’. I tend to want to put the word ‘silence’ in inverted commas because it is endangered and I don’t believe anyone living in London can experience true silence. Which is why I left this sleepless metropolis and took myself on an impulsive hike on Monday; in pursuit of this elusive phenomenon.

In other realms besides the natural, I have been solidifying my status as ‘late to the party’. Please find below some cultural escapism for you, from a woman on the edge.

WATCH:

Breaking Bad season 1 - Though admittedly a re-watch, this show is a rarity in that each season is an improvement on the last. The characters and relationships are given ample time and space to evolve into their true flawed form, with no major rush to exposition. The audience are trusted and thus rewarded with more to bite into than is afforded by many other TV shows. First released in 2008, the slightly grainy quality and high saturation make this masterful show a rich feast for the eyes, with the actors resembling real life human beings - some even have wrinkles!

The Wind That Shakes The Barley - A harrowing, frustrating, and educational historical drama, Loach’s 2006 film tells the story of the Irish War of Independence through the eyes of a handful of individuals caught in the middle of it all. The piercing blue eyes and boyish yet unnerving stoicism of a young Cilian Murphy on the cusp of greatness is also highly palatable.

LISTEN:

Other people on public transport - on a Southern rail service recently, I had the privilege of sharing the carriage with a professional opera singer. I deduced the man in question must have indeed been an opera singer from the following:

1. He had a Benjamin Britten score on his pullout tray

2. He was singing opera, loudly.

READ:

Said The Dead, Doireann Ní Ghríofa - After having been sent this book some months ago, I finally got around to reading it. I struggle with recommendations of ‘you’ll love this’ - as someone averse to any feeling of being easily known - but this book is tragic and witchy in equal measure. Amongst many other things that this book plays with, it tugs at the very real issue of women’s voices within the healthcare system.

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien - My father read this to my brother and I when we were little, on holiday in a campervan. I recall having an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite on my armpit during this trip. It swelled and was so hot - a buboe - I felt like a plague victim from the history textbooks. The Hobbit is a true bedtime story, a soothing antidote to the Arsenal chants outside my window, and it takes my dreams to the Misty Mountains. Aiming to complete the boxset by the end of the year.

EAT:

Real food, and more of it - Spare me the skinnytok. The people are hungry! The cost of living X ozempic culture collab has hit hard: I’m boycotting a local bakery because their portion size (of salad) felt like a fat-shaming microaggression in a bowl.

Simple snacking - I fear we have lost our way, snack-wise. Need we dabble in elaborate snackage? Whatever happened to a hunk of bread and cheese?

Black Sesame Mochi, Lidl. What started as a PMS-induced impulse purchase has now morphed into a profound and deeply loving relationship.

DO:

• Say ‘yes’ to things

• Be neighbourly

• Garden

• Road trip

• Bring back eavesdropping

Until next month,

Your Practitioner Anna Ticehurst

Recently recovering from cancer, from which she was told she wouldn’t survive, A Second Life thrums with the energy of Emin as she now stands; looking back on a life’s work with renewed excitement, and appreciation, yet a continued steely realism. I walked through the traditionally cavernous space - transformed for this exhibition to feel intimate - and finally understood the full power of her work. Often shown as a single painting, or tapestry - Tate have contextualised Emin, and show with immaculate care and appreciation, an artist who has forever changed the art world - especially for women.

I speak to Jess Baxter, assistant curator at Tate, about the process of curating this major retrospective. Baxter discusses the reality of reinstalling a dirty bed 28 years on, how the curation of this exhibition has affected her personally, and the porousness of artwork to encompass new meaning over time.

ANNA MORRISSEY: When you began curating A Second Life, what was your starting point? Was it a specific work, a theme, or a feeling that you wanted audiences to connect with and lead with?

JESS BAXTER: It was really exciting to look at a living artist’s work from when she started in the late 80s to today. It was honestly like a sweet shop at first (...) essentially [as a curator] you’re telling a visitor a story in eleven rooms, so it does need a beginning, middle, and end, and it does need a narrative. Because Tracey’s work is so expansive, and talks about so many different things, and she’s obviously so present, you want to get that right.

The work that was the departure point for the curatorial framework was Why I Never Became a Dancer, which is in room two. She talks about the misogyny she experienced, about Margate, and overcoming all that - escaping in a kind of ‘fuck you’ Tracey way.

ANNA: Was the show that you conceived of very different from the show that’s come about?

JESS: It went as all exhibitions do - through many lives. We always wanted it to be multimedia in each room; when you get the full story, when you get the context, when you get the life events that happen to her (which are often very, very traumatic), that’s when the other works come alive.

ANNA: What worked so well about this exhibition was that text was so present. Even her diary entries are framed; her words became the pieces of art. In her other works, the pieces of art encompass words, but here, the words were the art. In the videos too, you hear her voice so strongly. Is that an intentional move to combat misinterpretation?

JESS: People - particularly male journalists - have constantly projected what they think the work is, when Tracey’s literally writing it. Some of those [text] works were from the time she showed My Bed and before, they just didn’t look at it. It was really important for us to strip back the museum interpretation, there’s not many captions which I think people have really been grateful for.

ANNA: It means that you’re constantly immersed.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the press she’s been doing around this exhibition, and there is a distinct shift in her voice in this Second Life. I listened to her on Great Women Artists, and the way she talks about life and art, and how life is this combative force that we need to move forward with. It is just so interesting to see this older woman who has this whole legacy behind her, being so passionate about still making.

The history of misinterpretation from male journalists - do you think it’s become a critical part of the work itself? I was looking at My Bed and it is so wrapped up in that misinterpretation that it takes it on, and it makes it even stronger.

JESS: Thinking about artworks as these porous, absorbing things that change with time, and with interpretation. You can’t see anything without the voices. Everything is subjective, and it does not tarnish the work - but I hope people come to the show or My Bed, and see it for what it is without all the noise. It’s so surprising how your preconceptions of a thing; whether that’s an artwork or person or a celebrity, seeing them in real life is so different. My Bed is so much more tender, and I think sad, and Tracey says that in a lot of her interviews. It was this big, boisterous thing once, but now it’s, for me, like a shrine, all the individual objects are like relics the way she placed them.

ANNA: How was the creating of My Bed?

JESS: It was so fun. I love the logistical, tactile bit of installing. For My Bed in particular, we were under strict instruction at Tate not to install it without her and Harry [Weller] there. We just had the wooden frame and the mattress. It was crazy, under the sheets it is so dirty. You see a little bit of, I guess the human fluids. It was really weird to see its skeleton.

ANNA: It never occurred to me that it was a filthy bed.

Read more

April has flown by. A statement my mother would have asserted when I was a child, much to my confusion. But things do seem to “fly by” when you’re cognisant of more than playing with your Sylvanians. Time condenses the more of it you have experienced, and the first months of the year are now suddenly gone, coats discarded, Hinge redownloaded, as we move into summer.

As your self-appointed, un-qualified doctor, I suspect the season of April was mottled with tides of ebbing self doubt and flowing extreme narcissism. But maybe I’m projecting. Either way I have some cultural remedies to calm the waters, realign the spirit, and validate the ever-swelling yet ever so fragile ego.

LISTEN:

To me? your mother? Your flatmate as she sings in the shower (mine went through a stage of carrying home 2000s hits from the gym every morning, I’d wake up to a humming of Gwen Stefani as she put the coffee on, and her tune would accompany us both during our separate days.)

Famesick: A Memoir, Lena Dunham

Read by Lena herself, this is a confessional deep dive into the crevices of a life we have all conjectured over since HBO’s Girls: a cultural touchstone for the two generations of women that followed. BG (before Girls) there was rarely such barefaced realism of what it meant to be a woman on screen; chasing your dreams and knowing you’d probably be worse off financially than your parents, the narcissism of creativity, “sex from behind” with a gross man, being jealous yet deeply in love with your friends. AG (after Girls) television has been fundamentally changed, the space for complex female characters was carved by Lena and the team behind her (if not often ignored in more corporate writers rooms) - but at what expense?

Lena Dunham takes us through the realities of being lauded as a “genius” at just 23 when the messy, neurotic character she was writing was so closely farmed from her real personality. She takes us through her continuous struggles with her health, and the strain of fame on a sick body, the confusing journey of getting diagnosed, believed, overmedicated and addicted. Her narration is characteristically unreliable, honest and often charming.

READ:

Time to get out a niche book in the park again.

I’ve been reading Phanuel Antwi’s book On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace, whilst researching the next issue of the magazine. It is a beautifully in-depth exploration of the ways in which ‘the cuddle’ has shaped black lives throughout history - from the “cuddlespace” of the hold on slaveships, the claustrophobic “embrace” of institutions and oppressive systems, and how personal (particularly queer) intimacies can be a disruptive/reclamatory act.

The title is bold, and red, and evokes interest. I took a parallel journey with a man on the tube on Tuesday. We got on at Bank, he sat opposite me, and we both departed at Angel. I felt his eyes on my book intermittently. “How are you enjoying the book,” he asked as he rode behind me on the escalator to street level. We spoke about cuddling, and then said goodbye.

Another reverie of research for The Horny Issue:

The Veiled Woman, Anais Nin

Essentially porn. Very beautiful, and very short. Pocket-porn if you must.

WATCH

John Proctor is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower (Theatre)

Currently at The Royal Court, this modern revision of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible looks at the recurring motif of the witch hunt in society. This trope of pointing fingers has been repeatedly adapted to protect the oppressor - from The Witch Trials of the 1400’s to McCarthyism - yet schoolchildren are taught about the paranoia, social instability and overriding censorship of these historical periods through their teacher’s interpretation of Miller’s text.

John Proctor is the Villain is staged in a classroom in 2018 where their syllabus is mirroring the whisperings of accusations in the students real lives during the beginnings of Me Too. This parallel is interesting. Whilst not wholly successful, it does beg the question of what we are instilling in teenagers when centering this text - one in which the central (16 year old) girl is villainised whilst the married man who is having sex with her, and subsequently dies due to his reservation to sully his “name” by confessing to associations with the devil, is lauded as hero. He leaves behind his pregnant wife, but at least he has his pride right? The final scene of John Proctor is the Villain is powerful, the girls are angry and ‘hysterical,’ and there is some interpretive dancing (make of that what you will).

EAT:

As Rick Ross once said “shout out to all the pear.” I’ve been loving that bodacious fruit this month.

DO:

Write a letter to someone.

Our letter writing workshop a few weeks ago was very special, but it also made me hyper-aware of the novelty of the letter. We had some young chefs from the restaurant opposite sit with us, they wrote letters to their crushes, and posted them nervously. Girls from around London came and made friends with each other - writing to their future selves and their mothers. People revelled in the romance of the ritual, and feelings that may not have been voiced otherwise were committed to paper.

If you have no one to send your letter to, post one to the Tummy Ache offices: 47 Martello Street, London, E8 3PE.

Until next month,

Your Practitioner Anna Morrissey

Distance makes the heart grow fonder, as the saying goes. However, the meaning of ‘distance’ is shrinking in a digitally centred world. The possibility for immediate and constant correspondence means two hearts are, in theory, able to retain, or even create, relationships no matter the geographical barriers, with less thought than ever.

Arguably a defunct practice in 2026, letters are engaged with as artefacts; relics of bygone eras rather than a feasible means of communication. Tangible physical media is trending online as part of an analogue aesthetic, the subject of nostalgia for many. What letters allow us to see is the humanity of our forebearers in their solitude; those we have lifted up as above spelling mistakes and matters of the heart. There is a perverse voyeurism inherent in our pouring over letters already written, words never initially intended for public consumption.

The act of the handwritten letter has reached novelty status. They are the symbol of a life rich in a rare commodity few of us acknowledge the value of; time. There is value in letter writing as a leisure practice; a form of emotional meditation, perhaps. There is a clear hunger for letters to exist, and for craft and creation more generally; the toil and investment of creating something singular; irreplicable; hyper personal and crucially private* - the pendulum is beginning to swing.

Read more

LISTEN:

Nick Willing on Paula Rego - The Great Woman Artists (Podcast)

Rego’s son talks beautifully of the artists bravery and oeuvre. What I have noticed in the lives of women artists is that their children are often closely entangled in their work, in a way the children of famous male artists rarely are. Willing’s favourite paintings of his mothers represent specific moments in his childhood, he was intimate with those paintings, they framed his artistic education by making up his domestic interior.

Willing talks about Rego when she first began making work beside her mother as a child. She would be so urgently creating - it wasn’t about making a pretty picture but about creating an emotional truth on the canvas. He describes the making process as bodily, not one of consideration. Stepping back at the end of the painting, Rego was often embarrassed by how honest her paintings were. Her mother would say to her - you’ve done it now, deal with it.

Saya Gray - SAYA (Album)

I’ve been listening to this album a lot. It feels reminiscent of BANKS and the Tumblr era we’re all dying to get back to, but filtered through a modern lens.

READ:

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (1978)

“The pornographer as terrorist may not think of himself as a friend of women; that may be the last thing on his mind. But he will always be our unconscious ally because he begins to approach some kind of emblematic truth, whereas the lackey pornographer, like the devious fellows who write love stories for women’s magazines, that softest of all forms of pornography, can only do harm. But soon, however permissive censorship may be, he will invade the area in which censorship operates most defensibly, that of erotic violence.” - Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

Carter uses the framework of one of the most extreme and famous pornographers to highlight how the masochism that pervades the Marquis de Sade’s work continues to frame our intimate relationships and cultural understandings of sexuality. She pays homage to his honesty, calling him a moral pornographer for his unobscured renderings of the brutal reality of unrelenting misogyny. I’ve been enjoying reading this on the tube, crushed amongst sweaty armpits I like to imagine my fellow travellers are reading about “the celluloid brothel of the cinema” over my shoulder.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Talking of misogyny… I’ve steered away from Hemingway until now.

I read The Old Man and the Sea in one sitting. The simple idea of an old man going out to sea had me deep in the notes app at 4am. Hemingway speaks to bravery and endurance, of the sublime, and of being dedicated to honing a life-long skill - which has been lost in our current age of immediacy. That old man respected the sea, he danced with it and made friends with it. Our modern hubris has disconnected us from nature, we no longer see ourselves as part of the natural cycle but above it. Maybe we all need to be humbled by a big fish.

WATCH:

Crossing (Film, 2024)

A beautiful film. A woman travels to Istanbul to track down her estranged trans niece. A story of humanity, connection, understanding, and acceptance.

EAT:

Current hyper fixation: Meatballs.

Lamb or beef, served in a tomato and fennel sauce with brown rice. It’s very “friend’s chic mum”

DO:

Tracey Emin, A Second Life (Tate Modern)

This retrospective gives Emin’s work the respect it deserves, and the context it needs to be appreciated.

We see her wound(s), literally and emotionally. After being given a few months to live, and then miraculously recovering her health, Emin has created a show of the past 40 years of her working life. We travel through her early pain, depression, and trauma - witnessing the groundbreaking work she created as a young woman brazenly confronting her lived experience in a way no one had done before. Emin’s work is often denigrated as simplistic (predominantly by male critics). This show boldly challenged that lazy review, showcasing the turmoil that holds up her work and the deep appreciation for the process.

There are lots of brass sculptures on display, which I’d never seen before. Emin’s ability to capture movement and pain with complexity and minimal marks is really drawn out here, bringing her paintings into the physical room.

The exhibition then opens up into her ‘second life,’ dominated by large paintings that speak to her life through a new lens, one which is energised by the new time she has been given.

Signed,

Your unlicensed doctor, Anna Morrissey.

- Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

We dance with death, illness and war in different yet resounding ways each century, plagues and pandemics tear through civilisations, mysterious incurable diseases leave us in turmoil. The artists of each era are in many ways our corporeal and psychological documentarians, expressing something beyond fact, touching upon the bodily experience of suffering, pain and confusion distinct to that time.

This short history of sickness through art takes an overarching look at the relationship between illness and art from the middle ages to the modern day. Illness is an inescapable facet of life and it crops up in every era; the same symbols of death reverberate. Ancient art was synonymous with language - from cave paintings to hieroglyphics - drawing and mark making were beacons of communication. Imagery as language still prevails, artists speaking to what words cannot reach. Sickness exists as one of the major fascination of the artist for its inexplicability, once touched by sickness - cultural, personal or familial - it is a wound we must return to and tend to over and over to make sense of.

I. Plagued by God’s Wrath, AD 541–549

The first *recorded* plague, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian, was documented through religious imagery. Characteristically moralising, the swathes of unexplainable deaths were attributed to divine intervention during the Middle Ages. Christian symbolism dominated artistic expressions of the Justinian Plague, the motif of the arrow being shot down from above suggesting victims were meeting a fate beyond their control, of which they must not question. Saint Roch - patron saint of Plague victims - who was known to deliver aid to victims of the plague during this time, was depicted by many artists as a strong and saintly man revealing a plague bubo on his upper left thigh. The renderings of this time reveal the dire situation, and speak to the shock of the indiscriminate nature of infection; a force that does not abide by the religious hierarchy that previously protected those most respected.

II. Dancing with Death

The mass death of the Middle Ages sparked a need to make sense of things. The Dance of Death and Memento Mori (translated to “remember [that you have] to die”) are allegorical genres of painting that became extremely popular at this time. Often being led to a grave, or dancing mournfully with a skeleton, figures from popes, children and labourers were represented as being un-spared and in reach of death’s grasp. These paintings alluded to the infectious nature of the plague, whilst also summoning suspicion of friends and neighbours; proximity to death was represented as desultory, warning viewers to proceed in life with caution.

Susan Sontag stated in Illness as Metaphor that, “any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.” We will see this social hierarchising away from the sick and dying crop up again throughout history, especially around sexually transmitted diseases. Humans have been socialised to seek safety in the idea that those who are socially, morally or financially superior will be protected. The symbolising of death as a dance or musical instrument (common at this time) conflates death and willpower, those who fall ill are seen as unable to resist the enticing and hypnotic music of death, too weak of mind to remain amongst the living.

III. Cut Me Up in the Town Square

Read more

PRESCRIPTIONS:

LISTEN

I have taken it upon myself to become an album listener, to help efforts to round out my musical knowledge and understand the album as a concept; previously ignorant to how crucial the shaping and curating of an album is for artist and listener alike. My Spotify has been void of podcasts this month. Instead, I’ve been leaning into the drizzle, drinking in the drop-like plucking of guitars and pithy melodies of some folk music, amongst other things.

Parallelograms, Linda Perhacs

Perhacs’ first album, this was released in 1970, yet I’ve only just somehow managed to listen to it in its entirety.

Top track: Chimacum Rain

Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake

Continuing along my fascination with posthumous legacies of great artists, Nick Drake wrote this album at just twenty years old.

Top track: ‘Cello Song

So Tonight That I Might See, Mazzy Star

Dreamy pop is like therapy for the lover girls.

Top track: Blue Light

Think Tank, Blur

Raised in an Oasis household, I was never exposed to Damon Alburn’s songwriting as a child.

Top track: Sweet Song

READ: amidst the swathes of Valentine’s cards and unadulterated love letters, there were some books, too.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023)

If I’m honest, I was underwhelmed by this Booker Prize winner. I’m glad I read it so I could have an opinion on it, and whilst the concept is novel and I respect it hugely, I did find the structuring verged on repetitive. Maybe that’s something to do with my opinions on and respect for space travel, rather than the book or writing itself. It made me want to read more of Harvey’s work to investigate.

Olga Ravn, The Wax Child (2025)

An ethereal, haunting, harsh and other-worldly tale, I picked this up in a book shop late last year, read half of it right then and there until I was politely asked to buy it or leave. I’ve finally got my hands on it for real. Translated from the original Danish, the book is based on a real seventeenth century Danish witch trial, and I found its strange language and vivid, omniscient narration quite addicting.

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977)

My first foray into nature writing, Shepherd’s memoir details her lifelong relationship with the Cairngorns, a mountain range in Scotland. I trust her writing so much; her embodied knowledge of the landscape; her refusal to place categories over human experience; her depth of experience of one small corner of the world. And I have to mention the gorgeous introduction by Robert McFarlane in my edition of the book, and his reverence for Shepherd some decades after the book’s initial publication.

WATCH:

The Last Of Us (Television, 2023-)

Chronically yet shamelessly late to the party, I now do wholeheartedly understand the hype. As someone allergic to or at best impartial to post-apocalyptic media (because who needs it) - I have been consistently surprised at the sheer level of humanity this show displays. Although no one warned me about series two episode two, and frankly I’ve never been the same since. I’m unsure if I am willing to proceed, spiritually and emotionally speaking.

Sorcerer (Film, 1977)

This anxiety inducing joyride makes the perfect big screen movie. The Prince Charles cinema was fully booked for this viewing, and the cinephile audience made it all the more enjoyable. There is something so healing about a full cinema, about a group of people coming together in silence to watch four grown men try not to crash a pick up truck full of dynamite - a strangely healing experience. It was also refreshing to watch a film whose main characters all had interesting, unique faces, with crooked teeth. The notable lack of cosmetic procedures on screen was also incredibly refreshing, given the film came out in 1970, and added a more authentic, lived-in feel to the film.

Waiting For The Out (Television, 2026)

My mother recommended this to me. She has a crush on Josh Finan. BBC iPlayer’s cerebral and thought provoking drama exploring masculinity, generational trauma and philosophy provided a perfect remedy to the usual algorithmic slop.

EAT:

Sunday Roast at The Tram Depot

I told my date that I wouldn’t tell anyone about this sacred spot; that it would be ours. Oops. It was the perfect winter feast on what would have otherwise been an existential Sunday. There was also live jazz. I would recommend booking.

DRINK:

Turmeric tea - This golden concoction single handedly carried me through dry January.

Half pints - Whenever I attempt to drink full pints I end up bloated and steeped in regret. Half pints are the undeniably cute, slightly chic younger sibling; a recent discovery.

DO:

Martin Parr: A Fair Day @ The Photographers Gallery

I received The Last Resort photobook for Christmas, and watched the documentary after he passed away late last year. This free exhibition displays black and white works from Rural Ireland in the 1980s; the gathering of communities at Fair days at a time of great upheaval, in his signature style.

Storytime London

These events are exactly what they claim. People taking turns to tell stories in a low pressure environment. It is a lovely cosy way to be around people and connect. Some attendees might bring their own pen and paper to take notes throughout if they feel inspired, and others might read poetry, sing a song, or simply tell a story to the room.

Crosswords

My housemates and I have begun a weekly trip to our local café armed with the Big Crossword from the weekend’s newspaper of choice and a pencil. It makes for a wholesome ritual.

Check up scheduled for next month. See you then.

Julia Phillips talks to Tummy Ache about her inspiration behind the show, her physical presence within it, and her decision to remain opaque as an artistic figure.

Where does your fascination with interiority come from? You are dredging inside out and welcoming viewers to witness. Why is this important to you?

My fascination developed out of an interest in subjectivity. An interest in what makes humans individuals and, therefore, in our interiority, where I imagine our emotions, fears, experiences, desires, hopes, and dreams lie. In our subconscious, our psyche… Of course, none of these can be pinpointed to a single place within our body, whether the brain, the heart or the gut. But that makes it even more fascinating for me to “dredge” the body’s interior.

Figuration within art, within sculpture, is a tricky thing... It somehow often reduces visual representation to exterior markers, such as age, skin, hair, body type, ethnicity, gender expression, etc. Subjectivity, however, in my understanding transgresses these ascriptions. I still think of the body parts within my sculptures as figurative representations of the human form, but some are of imaginary insides. Take, for instance, my most recent works: Suspended Interior I and II. These forms are reminiscent of organs, tumours, or other sorts of condensed tissue, but they are blown up in scale, surreal to the degree that they would not fit in our bodies as volumes. In these works, I am magnifying an imagined aspect of our anatomy, hoping to confront an identification with it, even though it seems alienating and abject.

Many of your sculptures are dissections of body parts - heads, pelvises, torsos - tilted and hung to insinuate the movement of the body as a whole. Dissection has strong associations with surgery - but is also a famously voyeuristic trope. How does the dissection of bodies serve your practice?

I’d like to think of the fragments that I sculpt almost as scores, related to music and performance: an indicator of a direction. Not everything is spelled out, but hinted at. My hope is that these dissections or fragments prompt the viewer’s imagination.

But I’m also a formalist. In the end, I am interested in strong sculptural form, whether it be odd, arresting, balanced, or contradictory. I consider the air within the negative spaces of my sculptures to be a third medium alongside the clay and the metal. In my mind, the sculptures continue beyond their material boundaries, beyond their fragments.

And then, there is the use of metaphor in my work, be it mechanical or bodily. Representing a pelvis doesn’t just symbolize the body’s center, but what goes on in there–the organs, the physical processes. The focus that a fragment allows has a different meaning to me than a representation of a whole: chest plates, tilted at one another, are a minimal but also ambivalent representation of dialogue and confrontation. The viewer imagines what the rest of the body is doing–the arms, the legs, the face–thereby changing and completing the work, in a sense.

You keep yourself as an artist unknowable, yet your body as the cast for these sculptures is unavoidably present. How do you navigate being present in the work - both physically and narratively - as an artist?

Read more

Last night, having just finished Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, I flopped the book onto the floor, removed my bookmark, and lay staring at the ceiling. I’d found it entertaining, informative, and at times personally confronting, and admired de Botton’s, our analytical protagonist’s, refusal to indulge in either self-pity or self-protection. I’d finished it in time for Valentine’s Day, though admittedly my reading was not exactly ‘hot off the press’; the book was published over thirty years ago. But, like many more philosophical texts, time seemed irrelevant.

Marketed as a philosophical novel, each chapter explores a distinct aspect of falling in and out of love. De Botton blends immense wit (is it normal to fancy somebody’s written voice?) with philosophical debate, packaging it into a love story between himself and a woman named Chloe. Whether Chloe is real is beside the point. She and their relationship function as a vessel for inquiry of the psychological, social, and emotional patterns that govern romantic attachment.

To name something like love with what language we can is, by definition, to distill; to simplify. This is where de Botton excels: he lends an analytical eye to the inexplicable without pretending to know it entirely. Love, he insists, is terrifying. And this is one of the reasons we are undeniably and shamelessly addicted to it; its pursuit, its loss, its injustices. We are in love with our own idea of love. But love itself remains stubbornly and irresistibly uncooperative.

Read more

Take all with a pinch of salt and at your own free will.

PRESCRIPTIONS:

LISTEN

It was a month of narrative hunger, so I listened mostly to podcasts. I had forgotten the joy of sinking into a dramatised series - due to prior overindulgence and subsequent revulsion during the true crime podcast epidemic of 2015. I am now back in the grips of obsession - the pantomimic voice actors, the over the top sound effects. It’s historically resonant and slightly camp.

Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollack (Podcast)

An amazing portrait of the woman behind Jackson Pollack. Lee Krasner is unrelenting in her belief in the brash, out of control alcoholic. She was the IT girl of the New York art scene, and he was the random guy on her arm. But they were in love, and their financial situation meant one of them needed to start making some money. She decided it should be him, being a man and more likely to sell for larger sums, so she pushed him into a critically acclaimed greatness that arguably changed the art world forever.

Verb - To Krasner: To work tirelessly in order to raise the status of someone you love to that of universal and historical greatness despite their horrible personality.

Read more

Welcome to Sick Note, the digital addendum to Tummy Ache Magazine’s bi-annual print issue. We think emotional introspection is most successful when regularly practiced, so we have decided to bring you two monthly instalments of Tummy Ache content, writing, art, word vomit, brain rot, and other literary abjections.

Subscribe to Sick Note and receive two monthly prescriptions from the Tummy Ache team. Your ailments will be treated with care in the form of interviews with creatives we’re excited by, writers we love, short stories from guest writers, emotional wisdom and turmoil, think pieces, critical analysis, and more.

Check into the Tummy Ache clinic. We’ll write you a sick note so you can read our magazine in bed all day.