Wim Delvoye was born in 1965, in Wervik, Belgium. He lives and works in Gent and London.

Wim came to my attention recently during a program on our national broadcaster, the ABC. The show concentrated on “Cloaca” an installation created by Wim to replicate the human digestive system. Essentially the project allows the artist to insert food in one end and, after a series of processes we are all too familiar with, he is left with, well, faeces.

Cloaca is one of my favourite words. It comes from the name for the old sewers of Rome, but is also used to describe the multi-purpose hole that birds use to urinate, defacate, copulate and menstraute (aka providing eggs for our breakfast).

I think it is also worth mentioning that Wim also tattoos pigs. In fact he has been tattooing pigs since the 1990s. In the early 21st century a tattooed pigs project was set up in the Art Farm in China, where animal welfare laws are a little more than in most parts of the Western world.