![An animated image with the words 'bog god and god boggy' in the centre. Above and below the words are a set of crossed bones, and then a single bone is on the left and the right side of the image. All the bones are painted in a very loose, naive looking style, with messy watercolours. The bones vary in colour from dark brown to bright yellow, but they all look old and discoloured, like the bones have rotted beneath the ground before finding their way into the picture.](https://vitalcapacities.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/crossbones-title.gif)
Bog Gods
![An animated image with the words 'bog god and god boggy' in the centre. Above and below the words are a set of crossed bones, and then a single bone is on the left and the right side of the image. All the bones are painted in a very loose, naive looking style, with messy watercolours. The bones vary in colour from dark brown to bright yellow, but they all look old and discoloured, like the bones have rotted beneath the ground before finding their way into the picture.](https://vitalcapacities.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/crossbones-title.gif)
This is a kind of mock-up of something that’s been floating around my head for a minute. I’ve been crushing on illuminated manuscripts recently (particularly the 9th Century Christian Gospel manuscript The Book of Kells), and have been thinking about how to do a similar thing for a text-based adventure game (for example, here’s one I made earlier – I have no idea what the new game will be yet, but I’m trying to be ok with working in the dark about that and just following my guts). So this is it, an animated border for a game to come.
For over 5 years now whenever I start a new painting or drawing, before I put anything else down on paper, I draw some guts. It feels like they should be the foundation from which everything else is built on top of. The image of guts have become a stand-in for me that speaks to eating, digestion, shit, waste, and desire. So it feels appropriate for this to be one of the first things I make as part of the residency.