Bladder Piss Syndrome

Bladder Piss Syndrome explores disability via a series of chamber pots. Grounded in Crip theory — which challenges the neoliberal capitalist view of able-bodied and disabled bodies as constant and opposite — my work seeks to both subvert and winking-ly embrace pathologisation. Chamber pots exist at the intersection of ceramics, disability, and urine. In the Medieval mind, urine was key to diagnosing imbalances in the humours, so important that a flask of urine was a symbol of the medical profession. Today, medical imagining and internal investigation have primacy, and urine is reviled. Chamber pots, once ubiquitous household objects and sites of earthy political satire, have been relegated to the past. The value and significance of the body and its fluids change across time and place: our understanding of illness and health is routed less in empirical truth and more in the shifting sands of systems of knowledge and an ever-evolving medical industrial complex. I was diagnosed with ‘Bladder Pain Syndrome’ in 2021, an under-researched chronic condition affecting the nerves and lining of the bladder. At time of writing, I am still waiting for treatment. Bladder Piss Syndrome offers alternative and entangled modes of embodiment.