About the artworks:
Last year obesity went from being a descriptor to a disease. Did you notice? Did you go to bed one night as a person who happens to be fat, and wake up the next day as a disease? I don’t think this decision is going to help anyone. Fat people are bullied and shamed every day, and calling them diseased is only going to add to the stigma they face. And it’s simply not true. Plenty of fat people are healthy, and plenty of thin people are unhealthy. But society has been taught to be disgusted by fat, and the medical profession isn’t immune from this.
Late last year I went a doctor. I was tired, all the time – not just slightly tired, but bone tired. I felt like the waking dead. The doctor’s one and only response was to tell me I was too fat. If I was not fat, he said, I would not be tired. In the end, another doctor worked out what was wrong with me – and it had nothing to do with my body size. But I wonder what would the first doctor have diagnosed me with if I were slim?
The images in this collection are my response to the classification of obesity as a disease. The models that posed are an amazing group of intelligent, interesting, intriguing and gorgeous women, who also happen to be fat. Their beautiful bodies have been overlaid with the abstracted forms of some of the maladies that we’re wrongly told only the obese get – heart disease, diabetes, gall stones, liver illness…
Just don’t stand too close to them – you might just catch obesity!
