Abstract
My work is about fat: the shape, the texture, the mass, the body, and the identity. A fascination with the function of culture along with my struggles to understand my relationship with my body in the aftermath of an eating disorder (ED) drive my exploration of fat identity. My personal journey learning to truly see and trust my body within the context of a culture that condemns fatness has become a practice in unlearning the internalized stigmas diet culture perpetuates. The health, beauty and diet industries and the cultural constructs around the body that these industries create and uphold are primary sources of inspiration in my artwork as I explore what it means to inhabit a fat body in a thin obsessed, diet-centric world. In my interdisciplinary art and design practice, I have investigated fat identity through photography, bookmaking, papermaking, sculpture and installation. This most recent body of work in sculptural paper making and installation condemns the diet, health and beauty industries’ perpetuation of a fatphobic culture that stigmatizes fatness, encourages self-love and the celebration of all bodies, including and especially fat ones like mine. Through these paper bodies, my work confronts issues of consumption, notions of beauty and fat stigma with the intention of breaking down cultural biases and misconceptions around the fat body. It rejects the idea of the magical ‘default body’ our culture sells as a ticket to happiness and success, criticizes diet and beauty culture the means by which we are told we can achieve this body, and challenges a fatphobic health care system. My hope is that this work serves as a reminder that every single body is worthy of nourishment, respect, happiness, and love. I am still in the process of relearning to celebrate food, fat and figure, but through this body of work I am recognizing within myself and others the amazing capability, beauty and strength of the unaltered, unashamed, unapologetic fat body.