F I B R E C L U B
Fibre Club is a health-education initiative started by socially-engaged artist Katie Ceekay. It is a co-created project born in collaboration with illustrator and designer Julia de Jong and the Leeuwarden based art initiative VHDG.
How did this concept come about?
Katie started an artistic research path in March 2021 during her artist residency in the city of Leeuwarden. Using the abstract concept of an imagined Human Right to Dietary Fibre (Het Recht op Voedingsvezels) as an investigative lens, she stepped into the worlds of nutritional science, and health access. From there, Katie began to investigate a plethora of links—little fibrous threads—connecting social, political and economic issues with one of our most basic human needs: food. She brought Julia in early on in the process, specifically with the request “not just to design, but to pack this out together” and from there the two started their big fibre journey.
What is the club?
Fibre Club is aimed at being an educational and perspective-conscious resource, trying to tie up some loose ends when it comes to that little confusing but apparently very important thing: fibre. The Club takes shape as its first version in December 2021, one that stretches to a selected number of topics, in the knowledge that there are so many more questions, voices and relations to be made. In this, we want to make it clear that our material has no commercial or corporate agenda, and positions itself in that awkward but important tension between the realms of arts and culture, the political and the educational. Our aim was always to find balance between relevant, context-specific information, alongside a global perspective to amplify the issues and conditions which we found.
Fibre Club is free for all to use, and in fact, is not a club at all, but a space for anyone who might need it, enjoy it, or find relationality with it. We think that more efforts can be made to solidify health equity, and this in turn is our small nod from our artistic perspectives. We hope that the topics, references, interviews and other material provided offer some good food for thought and a springboard for engaging in two very important pillars to the Club: personal health and community health.
As we are not health professionals, we want to disclaim that any advice given is done so for research and educational purposes only, and that while we have worked with a registered dietician, you should check with your doctor or a nutritionist if making the suggested changes.