Gut Feelings: Digesting the Work of Catherine Telford-Keogh

1. The other day, I googled: “How much plastic do I eat in a year?” One of the first search results was a news article relaying a recent study about the quantity of microplastics that circulate in the air through household dust. According to their numbers—published in 2018 in the journal Environmental Pollution—as many as 114 plastic fibres will fall onto your plate during a given meal, totaling between 13,713 and 68,415 per year.[1] Before even beginning to consider what swirls in the water we drink, what is infused in the food we eat, what seeps out from the packaging it travels in, the very air we breathe has the capacity to feed us microplastics: in case anyone was left unconvinced, this inorganic mode of consumption is totally unavoidable. 

I’m thinking of a work by Catherine Telford-Keogh. XXXHesperides. Total Immanence (2018) is a human-height digital print of a sunset framed within a clear plexiglass box. It’s a beautiful image, that particular kind of saturated beauty that encroaches on numbness—like a pre-programmed screensaver or the backdrop for a soaring film studio logo at the beginning of a movie. This skyscape is indeed riddled with branded content: tiny clusters of distorted corporate logos, stock photography, and screencaps swirl amongst the clouds, barely visible at a distance. Like the microplastics scattered in the dust of my apartment, XXXHesperides. Total Immanence turns the glut of contemporary image culture into something like an atmospheric event: digital images caught up within infinite cycles of consumption and excretion, absorption and precipitation—that’s how they circulate between us, beyond us, and through our bodies. 

In XXXHesperides. Total Immanence, some patterns emerge: I see a few small constellations of the word submit echoed in transplanted website buttons and distorted text. It’s such a ubiquitous prompt in our online lives, but here the word becomes sticky with other meanings. In particular, so much of Catherine’s work is about a submission of a different sort: submitting oneself to inevitable flows of consumption, entropy, and growth. The plexiglass frame for XXXHesperides. Total Immanence features two perfectly circular holes, into which Catherine has poured a custom cocktail of vitaminwater® and Squeezed Lemonade®, which rests cloudy-white at the bottom of the image. When I visited this work, new clusters of brownish mold had already started to speckle the surface of the sugary liquid, crawling up the interior of the plexiglass, mingling with these images that swirl like fragments of a Google Image Search in the pastel sky. 

2. A few months ago, I sat in Catherine’s studio. We drank carbonated water from a blue-tinted plastic bottle, ate chocolate-covered almonds in a clear plastic clamshell package and “vegetable” chips from a crinkly aluminum-polypropylene bag. She was assembling two new, low, cylindrical sculptures for a group exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto[2], works that have continued in the material legacy of earlier sculptures Catherine exhibited in Source Supplements, her 2018 solo show at Evans Contemporary. Sitting somewhere between giant petri dishes, ashtrays, vibrant ecosystems, and stomachs mid-digestion, these works encase a dense array of quasi-consumable goods under a seductively smooth surface of coloured resin. The result feels remarkably coherent and stable, with crisp neutral-white siding that implies bio-medical levels of hygienic security. Yet each sculpture’s swirling innards articulate a messiness, a liveliness that exceeds its container. 

When referring to these sculptures’ contents as quasi-consumable, I mean this in the broadest sense: materials that linger on the borders of the organic and inorganic, materials whose “natural” qualities are supplemented by so-called “unnatural” means. For the University of Toronto sculptures—both titled X Supplement Aggregate Simulator X (2019)—contents including chia buckwheat and hemp cereal, sugar-free gum, Advil® tablets, pickles, and bars of soap intermingle under forest-green, purple, and teal resin, mixed with loose coins, plastic straws, ball-bearing chains, steel bowls, and laser-cut plexi lettering. Some of the more “perishable” goods will transform over time, like the sugary liquid growing mold in XXXHesperides. Total Immanence. Both X Supplement Aggregate Simulator sculptures highlight our complicated, value-laden relationships with contamination, purity, and disgust. 

Thinking of each X Supplement Aggregate Simulator X like something akin to a stomach—a representation of our (in)digestion at work—reminds me that despite popular hygiene products and trends in “clean” eating, contamination is as essential to human embodiment as breathing. Whether it’s the trillions of microorganisms that comprise the human microbiome—shattering any former belief in my body as a coherent, singular entity—or the very act of eating, of taking the outside world into ourselves and metabolizing it, perhaps we abhor contamination because it’s a glimpse into how fundamentally permeable we are. Indeed, Sara Ahmed writes of the connection between disgust and food as one about unacknowledged vulnerability: “the very project of survival requires we take something other into our bodies. Survival makes us vulnerable in that it requires we let what is ‘not us’ in; to survive we open ourselves up, and we keep the orifices of the body open.”[3] The uneasy dualities of Catherine’s X Supplement Aggregate Simulator X works—both chaotic and contained, industrial and biological, eater and eaten—allow her sculptures to carry both these concepts at once: the fantasy of a coherent, purifiable self and the infinitely messier, porous reality of being in a body with an open mouth. 

3. Last December, Catherine, myself, and a few others drove to Waterloo to visit her exhibition Dental Dam at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery.[4] In the car, I ate slices of a small clementine and tore pieces off a flaky pastry within a crumpled waxed-paper bag sourced from a local café. Dental Dam featured three other petri-dish sculptures—collectively titled Nutrient Pool (Threat SimulatorX) (2018): acidic orange, purple, and turquoise resin with grey steel flashing—alongside XXXHesperides. Total Immanence. The exhibition also featured a few additional wall works and two remarkable, grotesque sculptures made from customized gaming chairs, multi-tiered steel trays on rolling casters, sheets of granite that swirled with the colours of living tissue, and cafeteria trays growing a potent mixture of saliva, petroleum, and Bio-Pure®: a medical-grade cleaning agent used by dentists for sanitizing the tubing that evacuates organic material from patients’ mouths.    

After all, the mouth is where it all begins: it’s the locus for consumption and communication, for language, food, and sex. As a latex or polyurethane plastic barrier used in dentistry and oral sex alike, a dental dam is the perfect reference point for Catherine’s work: it’s a manufactured material that secures the mouth, rendering it non-porous—uncontaminated—yet still capable of sensation. The two additional wall works in Dental Dam—titled Tentaculum™ (Dental Dam) Fixation Pro Vital Series and Tentaculum™ (Dental Dam) Agape Pro Series (both 2018)—visualize this process most directly. The imperfect yellow-white of human teeth surrounded by shiny, plasticky tones in teal, blue, and purple are intercut with more distorted images and clouds of repetitious quasi-corporate product lingo. Indeed, Catherine’s use of language is particular: words swirl, stretch, and multiply like bacteria; laser-cut lettering merges with rotting pickles and plastic straws in her sculptures; her titles and material lists become dense and prickly with product copy, registered trademarks, and other symbols of capitalist ownership. 

Incorporating language and found images into this framework of contamination, it’s clear that Catherine’s work engages in the materials we take in on all consumptive registers: eating, shopping, absorbing, reading, viewing, clicking, sharing, processing. It’s an expansive understanding that considers the representable alongside the consumable, the legible alongside the digestible: to those moments in our lives where product names are so ubiquitous they transcend written language, to when we are exposed to over 4,000 ads in a given day without even noticing, to when we’re scrolling and sharing while we’re eating, shitting, and going to sleep. This is not to imply that Catherine’s work imposes some kind of judgement or morality on our contaminated ways of living. Rather, what her work provokes is a recognition of our complex entanglements—be they material, biological, digital, political—or the dense and interconnected forms of pleasure, complicity, and indigestion prompted by life under capitalism itself. 

4. “We are in and of the world, contaminated and affected” Alexis Shotwell writes, in the introduction to Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. “[…] Being continuous with everything on earth is a starting point for critical inquiry, rather than an explanatory end. That we are coconstituted and thus polluted and impure hails us to make continually contingent and unsettled decisions about how to be in relation to the world, with no predetermined answer.”[5] Catherine’s work also offers no easy answers, no explanatory ends. No promises of purity. No calls for diets or detoxes or plastic-straw bans, as if the morality of individual choice could shift large-scale ecological crises on its own. By offering contamination as a critical standpoint (or, an unavoidable one), her work asks what difficulties can be learned and felt—what “contingent and unsettled decisions” can be made—from the stance of an open mouth and lungs, from porous skin and churning stomachs. It’s a stance I will undoubtedly continue to chew on, to metabolize, to absorb.[7]

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader based in Toronto. 

[1] Ana I. Catarino et al., “Low Levels of microplastics (MP) in wild mussels indicate that MP ingestion by humans is minimal compared to exposure via household fibres fallout during a meal.” Environmental Pollution (Volume 237, June 2018): 675-684. Accessed online:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749117344445 See also Sarah Gibbens, “You eat thousands of bits of plastic every year,” National Geographic, June 5, 2019. Accessed online: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/you-eat-thousands-of-bits-of-plastic-every-year/.

[2] Common Place: Common-Place, curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, June 5—July 27, 2019. 

[3] Sara Ahmed, “The Performativity of Disgust,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004): 83.

[4] Dental Dam was exhibited alongside Katie Bethune-Leamen’s equally visceral and fantastic Orchid mantis. Tom Selleck. Hats. (Gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover.) Also hats. University of Waterloo Art Gallery, November 8—December 15, 2018. 

[5] Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 10. [6] Things I have eaten while writing this text: slices of cucumber removed from shrink-wrapped plastic sheathing; Pizza Hut® pizza (deep-dish, green olives, pepperoni) from a brown cardboard delivery box; two Advil Liqui-Gel® tablets and tapwater; President’s Choice® Olive Tapenade hummus; a spoonful of Kraft® peanut butter; a glass of Canadian Club® Chairman’s Select 100% Rye™; three to four cups of coffee; two pieces of Dentyne Ice® Peppermint Gum; one Chapman’s Super Ice Cream Sandwich® individually wrapped in a plastic sheet; and thousands of additional microplastics, if the Environmental Pollution study is correct. 

This article is published in issue 36.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue