“Pigs offered the greatest confrontation of categorisation. Energetic and friendly, the farm’s workers often forged personal relationships with them, choosing later if they wished to partake in the eating of a culled companion. These experiences revealed the complexities of eating a body you know – the workers either felt it honoured the life to participate in its consumption, were horrified, or understood it as a simple act of finality. In Colostrum (Bloodline), I wanted to look at the complexities of the reproductive lives of the pigs who live on the farm. Healthy females may be selected to live on as sows, granting them a longer life, though their reproductive function then becomes the stipulation of their continued survival. Colostrum, which is the first form of milk produced in the mammary glands after giving birth, offers the sows life-giving intimacy with their piglets. Acknowledging the mechanisation of the female pig’s body, while celebrating these corporeal cycles that connect her to the other pigs, highlights this formidable bond divorced from the practice of meat farming.” - Kat Lyons, 2021