Instagram story viewer> @kat.gillespie> Posts

Kat Gillespie

@kat.gillespie

10.6K

followers

3736

following

London
words and images
🏹 @devouringwithoutguilt

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

With the inimitable @atinamattiel a couple of years ago. by @kat.gillespie

79

6

3 years ago

@laurenalicejohns on medium format. 🥀 by @kat.gillespie

32

0

8 months ago

From the archives. One of my favorite test shoots. taken in Hyde Park by @kat.gillespie

86

2

3 years ago

This week marks 16 years being ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis, exactly half my life. I don’t remember the exact date I woke up feeling ill, I didn’t think to mark it as I didn’t know the illness would go on forever, but it was the week of my dad’s birthday, and I was 16. It is a disease with no treatment, with one of the lowest qualities of life, and with very low funding or public awareness. What illness has taught me over the years is that suffering is not redemptive. It is isolating. It takes and takes. It is generative in its destruction, multiplying devastation and touching all of life. There’s no upside. I am not brave or inspiring. I am just surviving. People assume that chronically ill people are used to their suffering. You do not get used to it. Every day I wake up and remember I am ill and wonder, will it be this, forever? And every day since I was 16 the answer has been yes. by @kat.gillespie

71

22

10 days ago

It’s Anne Carson day, all hail the queen by @kat.gillespie

58

3

11 days ago

Anne Carson won the Nobel prize and it’s the first crisp sunny day of fall and I’m laying on the sofa staring at the golden sun illumined leaves against a pure blue sky (Her words have meant more to me than I could possibly communicate) by @kat.gillespie

15

0

11 days ago

Yesterday Duane Michals died. He was my favorite photographer and deeply impacted my creative sensibility. I was introduced to his work when I took a black and white film photography class at 22. My final project for that course was inspired by his work. (These are some fragments of that work). The combination of words and handwriting felt like a revelation to me, and still does. His playful but deeply mythological work struck a chord of beauty and irreverence that excited me. I encountered his work just as I was beginning photography and discovering it as a means to create, travel, to break out of the place that was suffocating me. I did not grow up in an environment where art was seen as important. I was in the Texas suburbs north of Dallas, cookie cutter suburbs and endless highway, in an extremely restrictive religious (evangelical) environment, homeschooled, closed off from the world. I was in a desert of beauty where occasionally literature could break through but not much else. His work was one of the first ‘real’ artists I encountered whose work pricked me. I had just left the cult I was raised in, I was at university and having my mental landscape blown open. I was trying to figure out how to escape Texas (this wouldn’t happen for another 3 years). I was high off Nietzsche and had encountered Woolf, Barthes, Joyce for the first time. Yesterday I thought back on those days. The sense of desperation- of never knowing enough, of not having read enough , of constantly learning of artists and writers others in my sphere who grew up cultured have always known about - that debt of cultural capital will probably never be paid, especially in London where class and education are so clearly delineated. But at least I’ll always be discovering new writers and artists to love. In my project I was exploring the same struggles I still face - the desire to read and dream and simultaneously the desire to be in the world. The last line of the project was ‘She who dreamed also lived’ - both suitcase and book in hand. With chronic illness going out is increasingly difficult but I’ll hold on to my dreams and books. Thank you Duane Michals for sharing your dreams. by @kat.gillespie

26

3

4 months ago

Today is ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) visibility day. I’ve been in a PEM (post exertional malaise) crash so I wasn’t planning to post anything. I tend to need to go inside myself, emotionally and physically curled into a ball, during periods of worse PEM (there aren’t really any totally well days in my life. Just days that are more or less bearable). I became ill at 16. I’m now nearly 32. I haven’t planned what to write and I’m writing badly, through brain fog and cognitive impairment probably caused by the nueroinflammation and elevated brain lactate caused by this disease. I have spent most of the past 15 years of my illness pretending to be well, in denial that I am disabled, and trying to not be defined by my illness even though it limits every part of my life. I have so much I could say. I could talk about the ten years it took to get diagnosed, and how there’s no official treatments or medication. I could talk about illegibility and medical gaslighting; about the history of ME, steeped in misogyny. I’ve never forgotten that an aids researcher said that they’d rather have aids than ME. It is that horrible. I have many thoughts but lack the energy to present them in a coherent way. This disease affects at least .4% of the population and is the least funded disease by disease burden. It is very vulnerable to admit that most of my life is spent in bed (even on the now rare occasion that I travel) and that every good moment in my life is paid for later by days or weeks of heightened symptoms. This disease punishes exertion of any form: physical, emotional, intellectual. Which is perhaps the cruelest thing about it, especially for someone highly ambitious and hungry for life. Being chronically ill is profoundly isolating, especially with the particularities of this illness. I try not to talk about it too much, or make it my whole personality, but today on a whim, remembering that it’s ME awareness day, and remembering this photo taken of me by one of my few true friends, I thought I would write, imperfectly, instead of staying silent (silence is the most true / yet I must speak) by @kat.gillespie

229

34

5 months ago

Je t’aime Marseille (some scenes from my weekend at @tuba.club in 2024, on medium format film) by @kat.gillespie

41

2

9 months ago

An old favorite. On film. Taken in Hyde park, of a beautiful stranger reading on a summer day. by @kat.gillespie

42

6

9 months ago

Things I read/watched/listened to and loved in 2025…any list of this kind will be imperfect , inadequate and partial (just like my reading/watching) but I am going to share some of the things that made life feel worth living this year. It’s impossible to know what will stay with me in the future but these are the things that feel important right now, in this moment.
I wrote out the books, with an unpracticed hand, in the bitter cold, with a new pen, on watercolor paper, in the last bit of light of 2025. The list is not in order. The stars are next to the ones I loved most (but I did love them all). Today I finished Bread of Angels, by my patron saint, Patti Smith; a book on mysticism and grief and the sacred and the secular, and a perfect read with which to end this year. I also want to mention the books that mist deeply affected me: things in nature merely grow, by Yiyun Lee; Garments against Women, by Anne Boyer (as featured above) and Frank Sonnets by Dianne Seuss. I am too tired in this moment to adequately write about these books but they felt revelatory. I am also currently reading A Truce That Is Not Peace, a book that will be the first book I will finish in 2026, which I do not need to have the words to describe because @oonaghdt said everything that could be said in her marvelous piece, Westward Glances, that left me breathless. I really loved @daisylafarge ‘s Substack - I always look forward to her writing on chronic illness, and her interviews with writers / artists with chronic illness (and I also loved her book Lovebug). Another Substack I love is @elviaagain ‘s - her piece on Rebecca led me to reread it this year, and to discover how much more delightful the book is at 31 than it was at 18 (and I also loved her piece Elvia Incorporated.) Garth Greenwell’s essay on Giovanni’s Room - which I had read early this year and not loved as much as I wanted to- was a perfect piece of writing (via the wonderful @queer_modernisms). And Anne Carson’s writing on having Parkinson’s in the LRB was powerful- I’m determined to read her in 2026.
more below : by @kat.gillespie

43

10

10 months ago

2025 was a year of letting go. I was forced, finally, to stop photographing weddings due to worsening of chronic illness; an inevitably, not a surprise, but still a bitter pill. Especially as I had been on the verge of the summit of the kind of success and recognition I’d been working towards my whole 20s, sacrificing my health to capturing other people’s celebrations. I have much to say on this but I won’t write about it here.
I’ve been forced to spend more time in bed this year than probably ever. I’ve had more doctors appointments and tests than ever (to no avail, as I’ve learned to expect having lived with chronic illness for so long. But it’s still difficult to relinquish hope that some doctor will someday be able to explain me, if not cure me. I remain an enigma). But I am less sick than I could be and I try to see what I have, not only what I’ve lost. I’ve been more alone this year, if that’s possible: I thought I was already used to isolation. I’ve also grown closer to long distance friends, learning the joys of sending voice notes, a modern epistolary form. I’ve begun to commit myself fully to the world of words, the world I’ve always belonged to at my truest core. The realm of art and language is the only place I’ve ever belonged. Books have always been the closest thing I have found to salvation. It is a partial salvation, a failed salvation, but a refuge nonetheless. I live in a state of hopeful hopelessness, balancing rage and desire with a loosely held acceptance. by @kat.gillespie

45

8

10 months ago