Project Abstract
Body neutrality is simply appreciating and accepting one’s body for what it can do and how it looks, even if it is not where one would like it to be. Body neutrality is a middle of the road approach, right in between body positivity and body negativity. Falling into a negative mindset is not a productive way of coping with any perceived shortcomings involving one's body or outward appearance. Those who get caught in an overly negative body mindset are at risk of multiple issues related to body image and self-esteem including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-harm. Adopting a body neutral mindset has been helpful for me personally;allowing space to appreciate what my body does for meand what it may become capable of doing as I work towards healing from past body image issues, disordered eating patterns, self-hate, and self-neglect. This body of work is a reflective exploration of my past relationship with my body and the positive effects that I have experienced since adopting a body neutral mindset. My body of work incorporates a variety of mediums to help share my narrative including video, photography, sculpture, ready-mades, performance art, and more.
CONTENT WARNING
This work tackles subject matter that may be triggering or upsetting to some viewers. Topics touched on in this project include: anxiety, depression, self-neglect, disordered eating patterns, obsessive behaviors, and calorie counting.
Dining Table Piece
This piece heavily focuses on food through two lenses: disordered eating patterns & self-neglect for one and caring for myself and nourishing my body as the other. The dining table is set up with plates and bowls of food on two sides. On one side of the table there is an empty bowl, several plates and bowls filled with too much food, and some plates and bowls filled with not enough food. This side of the table represents the foods I consumed (or did not) when I was heavily in a disordered eating pattern mindset. These foods are presented in a mix of freshly made and packaged food items. The freshly prepared foods will begin to go bad and rot while on display. The other side of the table has plates and bowls that are presented with sculptures of foods that are nourishing and fueling my body. I threw the ceramic plates and bowls that are used as display pieces, cooked the fresh foods, and hand sculpted the ceramic foods.
The dining table piece was one of the most impactful pieces that I created. I wanted to be able to compare how I fueled and nourished my body in the past to now after adopting a body neutral mindset. I sculpted the kinds of foods that I eat now, while engaged in a body neutral mindset where I want to care for my body, from porcelain. These food sculptures are presented on plates and bowls that I threw myself. Looking at this food, I see someone who understands the importance of eating and nourishing one’s body. Comparing that to the foods on the other side of the table, the side that represents a more self-destructive mindset, is enough to almost bring me to tears. I used to really abuse my body through the foods that I consumed or did not consume. I used real foods to represent a full day’s worth of food that only adds up to 500 calories total, I did not eat for a week on more than one occasion so that is represented by an empty bowl, and an entire day’s worth of food is represented by overflowing plates with full meals and a platter filled with snacks, desserts, and cereal.
I have engaged in very disordered eating patterns and habits in my past and this table setting piece really made me face that reality. In the moments where I was engaging in the destructive eating behaviours, I was in denial. I did not see anything wrong with what I was doing. “I don’t have an eating disorder,” I would say to myself. “People with eating disorders do these kinds of things day in and day out for years and years. I just do them some days” I would think, not realizing that these “some days” had become very frequent and sometimes these “some days” would happen for days, weeks, or months in a row year after year.
Sometimes the goal of these disordered eating patterns was to lose copious amounts of weight as fast as humanly possible. Other times I ate and ate and ate until it hurt because I felt I had somehow “earned” a cheat day only this innocent cheat day would become an all-out binge fest. I would buy tons and tons of junk food to eat on top of my regular meals. “I have to eat it all now and it has to be gone TODAY so that I can start over fresh in the morning” I would tell myself. If things were left over to the next day, I would just start it all over again. “Might as well have another cheat day to get rid of all of this.” Only I would get more that day to take advantage of the second cheat day. This led to more leftovers spilling into the next day, again, where the cycle started all over. I would go days, weeks, months eating like this. I would feel great in the moment but awful by the end of the day, bloated and sick to my stomach. Days, weeks, and months of eating like this led to regaining all of what I had lost and then some from when I was heavily restricting my food intake. This would of course lead back into restricting as much as possible to lose as much as possible as fast as possible. It was a very unhealthy and vicious cycle that I just could not break no matter how hard I tried.
Get Ready with Me: Performance Piece
This performance piece is inspired by “Get Ready with Me/GRWM” videos that are posted on social media but with a twist. I begin the performance by entering the space wearing only some small shorts and a short tank top. I begin putting on clothes that are on the clothing rack, observing how I look in the mirror on the back of the door in a critical way, and then removing the clothes only to begin the entire process over again. This cycle of getting dressed/undressed happens several times with various clothing combinations and each time I remove the clothes they are left scattered on the chair and floor. The performance concludes with putting the first outfit back on and leaving the room. Clothes are left scattered on the chair and floor as a remnant of the performance.
The “Get Ready with Me” performance is a recreation of a behavior that I have participated in numerous times. The act of getting ready has felt impossible in the past due to how I felt about and viewed my body in the past. No matter what I put on my body, no matter how many times I changed clothes, I still hated what I saw in the mirror. Sometimes I would give up and decide that going out wasn’t worth all the trouble of going through this ritual. Other times I would end up back in the first thing I put on feeling as though I was just settling on an outfit but still not enjoying how I looked. These days, I rarely engage in this kind of behaviour. If I do find myself caught up trying on several different outfits, it is because they all look great and I cannot decide which to wear. It is almost the opposite kind of problem compared to what I used to struggle with when getting ready.
I Appreciate My Body
This set of images is centered around my body and how I have grown to appreciate it and all that it does for me since adopting a body neutral mindset. Included in these images are parts of my body that I used to view very negatively for not being where I wanted them to be visually as well as parts of my body that I have always loved. I photographed my hand, arm, face, belly, legs, and feet in black and white.
This series of images was one of the last pieces that I created. I put it off because I was not sure how I would end up feeling about the images themselves. I was afraid that even after all of this work and reflection, I would still be overcome with negative emotions upon seeing the end result. The opposite has happened. I am even more appreciative of my body and what it does for me each and every day. My hands help me to create, my arms lift heavy objects and can embrace those I care about, my face helps me to express myself to the world, my belly houses my organs that help digest the foods I eat and fuel my body, my legs hold me up, and my feet take me places. Before adopting a body neutral mindset, I may very well have been rather upset to see a series of images of my body like this. “It looks disgusting, look at those stretch marks, I can’t believe how much cellulite there is, I am hideous and wish I didn’t exist” would have been thoughts that swirled through my head. Instead, I see these images and know that my body takes care of me and does so much more for me than simply act as a visual representation of myself. I now appreciate my body significantly more than I ever did before.
This is Totally normal: Video Piece
This video focuses on the behaviors that I often found myself engaged in when I was in a more disordered, overly critical, or negative mindsets. These behaviors include obsessively weighing myself at all times of the day including but not limited to: first thing in the morning, before/after going to the bathroom, before/after eating, and at the end of the day just before bed, weighing/measuring everything that I put into my body, and performing body checks in mirrors and reflective surfaces every chance that I got.
In the obsessive behaviors video, I am performing behaviors that are obsessive in nature but focus on my body or the foods I put in it. Some of these behaviours were very obviously problematic at the time like weighing myself multiple times per day before/after doing anything. Others began innocently enough but became obsessive over time like weighing and portioning my foods as well as calculating calories down to the tiniest crumb consumed. Seeing these behaviours, among others, compiled in a video really brings to light just how disordered my eating habits, behaviours, and thought patterns were at the time. Seeing these behaviours and activities performed once or twice doesn’t raise many red flags but seeing them performed over and over and knowing that I used to do them over and over and over again is alarming. I was unaware at the time just how harmful these behaviours were mentally and physically, but it is crystal clear to me now. I can even recognize now when these behaviours try to sneak back up and I can shut them down before it gets out of hand again.
Instagram VS Reality
This piece brings together two sides of myself through the years. One side shows what the world has seen all along; the me that I chose to share via Instagram. The other side shows what I have kept hidden from everyone for almost a decade at this point; my food logs from MyFitnessPal.
The selfies of my body and face that I posted on Instagram are the ones that I felt comfortable with sharing with the public at large. Behind each post, though, was countless other selfies that didn’t make the cut. They had bad angles, showed too many rolls, or my hair wasn’t quite right so those images had to go so the few “good ones” could be shared. Some of these posts boasted body positivity, healthily working out, or being accepting of one’s body, things that were quite honestly total lies.
These logs from MyFitnessPal all correspond to times around when these selfies were posted. These logs show just how not body positive or healthy I actually was at the time. These logs are the reality behind the posts from Instagram.
Emotion Paintings
This series of paintings is centered around reflecting on my mental states at various points in time throughout my changing relationship with my body. I chose to approach these paintings in a very freeform and abstract manner. I worked very wet, with my paper completely soaked with water, allowing the water and watered-down paints to flow and mix with one another, much like feelings and emotions can flow and mix into one another. I scattered rock salt across the surfaces of these paintings to add some visual texture and variety to them, a technique I have always enjoyed.
The emotion paintings were the first series that I completed for this project. It felt like a nice and uncomplicated way to ease into this whole daunting process. Despite some of these emotion paintings focusing on conveying the negative emotions that I once felt, the process of creating these paintings was incredibly enjoyable. I worked on all six of them simultaneously but it was not until the very end that what I had hoped for began to emerge. I could clearly see the emotions that I was aiming for represented on my paper. The paintings representing a negative mindset and thought patterns felt just as I had hoped; messy, dark, overwhelming. They feel like how it feels to be experiencing these emotions in the moment. Meanwhile, the positive mindset images are more light and airy; like how it feels to be in a positive mindset. Looking at these finished paintings has really helped me to visualize the positive effects that adopting a body neutral mindset has had on me. I cannot look at these paintings, see illustrated in them where I was and where I am now, and say that body neutrality has not made a positive impact on me.
Negative Mindset. These three paintings are meant to convey, or were inspired by, depression, self-hate, anxiety, brain fog, and hiding my true feelings from others.
Positive Mindset. The these three paintings are meant to convey, or were inspired by, self-love, appreciation, happiness, forgiveness, and growth.