My art is an act of self-love!
My art was born out of my journey towards body positivity. It began in October of 2014 when I discovered an incredible non-profit that does trainings and workshops for people around the issue of body image. At a certain point as I was doing this work, I realized that I needed to find ways to actively cultivate self-love in my life, but I had no idea how to go about it.
One night, while staying at a fancy hotel, I was inspired to do a photo shoot with myself and when I looked at the pictures, I felt awful. I hated them. I knew that I had to do something about it and that it wasn’t my body, but rather my mind that needed fixing. It occurred to me that perhaps if I drew the pictures...if I turned them into art, then maybe I’d be able to see their beauty. So I did just that. I happened to have some scrapbook paper and I chose a piece that was beautiful, and I sketched my image onto the back of it, went over the sketch with a sharpie, and cut it out.
I made 5 ladies that night, all on differently patterned paper, laid them out next to one another and thought, “Look at my beautiful body!” From then on, I was hooked. After a couple of months of using myself as a muse, I decided it was time to branch out and practice finding the beauty in others. The amount of beauty in this world is staggering and I do my art primarily because it helps me see more beauty, and also because I believe it can help others see their own beauty. I am committed to expanding of our cultural understanding of what beauty is. Connie Sobczak, co-founder of The Body Positive puts it well when she says, “When we each see our own beauty, we can see so much more beauty in others because we no longer feel the need to compare ourselves to them.” My art is my activism against the existence of a single beauty ideal and my practice of radical self love.