Why I made this -
a metabolic story

I have spent most of my life with patterns: how forms and processes entangle, how one thing becomes another, how boundaries soften if you look long enough.

Then came GUT MATTERS.
You are a donut. The hole inside you is the world.

For years I followed that tube inward and outward, through my own body and collective ones. Somewhere along the way my gut stopped being a subject and became a teacher. I got very ill. I tried to control everything that entered me, and it didn't work. What worked was remembering what I had been studying all along: metabolisms are not rulebooks, they are a complex web of entangled relationships.

At the end of Facing Human Wrongs, a residency with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, the research began to ferment into something else. I found some fruit cartons and drew the JUMPER ∞ EXPANDER, the PERFORATRIX and the LASAGNA, figures who have been helping with me for almost twenty years. Those were the first cards.

A GTDF fellowship gave me six months to draw, write, digest, compost, and begin again.

In autumn 2025, RELATIONAL GYM was ready: 39 cards to co-sense, co-think and co-feel with. It's not a Tarot and not a rulebook. It's practical enough for the factual and open enough for the spiritual, a place to practise thinking through and with things rather than about them.

Collapse is one movement. Emergence is another. So is beauty, right next to everything that is broken.

I didn't make this deck because I know better. I made it because I need it too.