Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns, clusters of small holes or bumps. 

I was first inspired to do this project when I was cooking some potatoes that had, disgustingly, sprouted. I had originally decided to create a hellish dreams-cape filled with trypophobic creatures, but I soon realized that the creatures were the stronger aspect of the project, so I focused the project entirely on these creatures. I felt it important to ground them in reality in order to amplify the uncanny-valley, so I began taking real animals and combining them with trypophobic textures. 

I thought it might be interesting to compile this collection into a form of a bestiary, however the animals found in bestiaries typically have strong symbolic meanings, and were typically used as a way of making sense of the world. And so, I decided to combine the trypophobic imagery already established, with the animals that were typical in medieval bestiaries (i.e. lions, Cranes, Harts etc.), as a way of altering the meaning. 

When establishing the visual language for this project, it became apparent that it was becoming more of an allegory for disease rather than a dreams-cape or bestiary, and the style was perhaps more in line with old biological illustrations of flora and fauna. This then led to the idea of instead formatting the illustrations like research notes on animals, as if being discovered for the first time - using those featured in medieval bestiaries and other animals of symbolic significance to anchor the illustrations in an already established narrative.