Sadie Tankard Bowkett
Sadie is an artist whose practice explores health, illness, and the politics of the body. Her work critically examines the Western medical gaze and the ways institutional systems categorise, map and commodify bodies through diagnosis, treatment and care. Drawing on her experiences of chronic illness and allergic skin conditions, Sadie approaches the body as archive and landscape. Central to her practice is the idea of skin as a threshold between internal and external terrains: a surface where unseen physiological and emotional histories become visible. Through installation, text and spatial research, she draws parallels between the body and the earth, referencing aerial archaeology, mapping and the traces hidden structures leave on a surface. By translating medical imagery, testing systems and bodily reactions into visual and textual forms, her work seeks to reimagine the experience of illness beyond institutional frameworks, opening space for holistic, empathetic understandings of care, vulnerability and interconnected systems.
Dear Bella,
I am sad we have found each other in such dark times but wanted to share some things I have been thinking about in relation to being sick.
I’ve always found the idea of ‘city’ difficult. That few people have designed these streets out of concrete and plastic and steel, where green is enclosed, mediated, restricted and where buildings align themselves in disorientating repetitiveness. Where humans reside behind artificial walls that separate us. Where we make every attempt to live against the way humans are supposed to live.
The misery we feel in pursuit of convenience…
Susan Sontag’s ‘Illness as Metaphor’ states, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the land of the well and the land of the sick.”
It seems the city is not the problem, it is the version of the city that we and so many other sick people have to exist in.
It’s an alternate universe
The city is a virus
Food is poisonous
Water is contaminated
The house is alive with mould
Exercise is punishing
Exercise is dangerous
Love is dependence
Living is inflammatory
Concrete is chemical, plastic leaches,
Everything has consumerist agenda
Everything is a conspiracy against the vulnerable
Gradually you find yourself unable to connect with those around you who feed on these artificial modes of joy that you can no longer participate.
Chocolate, dancing, beer,
restaurants, hikes, cigarettes,
yoga, cocaine, art galleries,
flirting, nightclubs, reading,
sunlight, travel, dating,
driving, smiling,
music, speech, touch.
Suddenly everything has an unimaginable price. Suddenly you become alien to the modern world.
Recently I have been lucky enough to find you as a citizen in this land, although I hope you are just passing through. It seems to me that the land of the sick has many parallel worlds and unlike the well, all are insular, isolating and come from deep within, to a cellular level. Illness should not be a metaphor but it is a total transformation of our relationship to our bodies and the world and finding the language to express that is critical to our spiritual survival.
I’m so grateful to have you as a citizen in this universe of ours and I hope that your citizenship to the land of the sick expires imminently and that you take me with you to the land of the well. As Jenny Holzer wrote, “I want to go to the future please.”
Lots of love,
Sadie
Dear Sadie,
I feel intimidated in writing a response because nothing I ever say could be as wonderful as what you did. I can’t read your letter without crying. Crying both out of sadness and joy. I am sad about what has had to happen to connect us. In the same breath, I am so grateful it did. I feel so fortunate to have had you come into my life and I hope you never leave it.
Bella
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