Stress

The first stress a human body endures is birth. It is also the system that builds us. The same response that delivered us into the world later breaks the parts of us that survived it.

The book makes that response physical. Each chapter is a body system; each material is its stress reaction. Silicone for the muscles. Porcelain for the heart. Burns on paper for the digestive system. Sealed paint for the hormones. Expanding hydrogel for the throat closing. The book is bound on a grid of the average gestation - a body remembering its own arrival as it falls apart.

What creates us destroys us. The book is a record of that, not a complaint about it.