My project began with a painting. The painting 'The Three Ages of Woman' by Gustav Klimt was the pivotal moment in my creative Research that influenced me in making a figurative piece for my final third year project. This painting depicts three women of differing ages in different stages of life, the figure that intrigued me the most was the oldest woman. what drew me to this specific figure was the subject itself, I began wondering why is this woman- oldest of the three- portrayed so depressively? I began imagining her age was directly correlated to her appearance and body appreciation. I began to research body image within a cultural setting and used this to further research my work and developing eventually my critique on feminine beauty in todays society. I persued this further by looking at body image disturbance, and mental health issues created by self image distortion. It was during this line of inquiry that I stumbled upon a mental illness based on body image called Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
Body Dissmorphia, or BDD for short is a mental illness which effects the way a person views a flaw or defect in their appearance. This was a mental illness that I had herd nothing about previous to researching it, and because of its anonymity I was shocked to learn that this illness is found in 5% of people in the 1st world population, that means that more people suffer from this illness than Bulimia. and yet it is relatively unheard of. The illness causes the sufferer to become irrationally worried about a specific element of their body which they interpret as ugly. This can be anything, from the face to their height, it can cause serious anxiety in patients and severe cases can lead to mental health issues such as agoraphobia (the fear of going outside) and sometimes can create suicidal tendencies in extreme cases. From my Research I decided that this illness was interesting to me in a contextual aspect, but also I wanted to advertise the immense negative effect this under publicised mental illness has on its sufferers.
I began research into artists that were dealing in mental health issues, and came across this work by artist Natalia Pereira. It consists of models with rubber bands around their faces distorting their features. This distortion of the face hints at how BDD sufferers can sometimes feel about themselves, they might think they are so ungainly that they can no longer be seen by others, for fear of being judged. This idea of personal identity crisis was an influential role in how my work developed, by having the face distorted by hair gives the viewer a sense of self hatred and fear of being judged and critiqued.
Body image is an exiting subject for modern artists to investigate, and there are thousands of examples of body image used as a context in art. When I came across this work by Ted Lawson named Eve. This work spoke directly to me by highlighting the circle of womanhood, ending in the two extremes of the female body. Its figurative element was an interest to me but it was the circular display, where the viewer can orbit the work and in that action can judge the beauty of the subject against other versions of itself. The simplicity of this work creates a dialogue of feminine beauty and feminine self image which I have developed in my work by explaining the underlying obsession women have about their own bodies and personal beauty.
Leigh de Vries work, based on her own experiences of BDD, is a prosthetics artist based in London who used her own BDD as inspiration for a prosthetics which she applied to her own face in order to highlight the issue that sufferers with BDD experience a different version of reality than others. She created the prosthetics by using what she saw in the mirror as inspiration. She then created a short film showing her out in the general public and their reactions to her 'imperfection'. The public reaction that were shown in the video is a overriding fear that BDD sufferers have of others judgeing their imagined flaw. This is why BDD patients often avoid contact with others, and try and conceal their flaws from loved ones. Sometimes this is why the BDD goes unnoticed and there are even case studies of husbands and wives, which don't realize that their partners has BDD.
Discomfort signals are bodily movements or habits that a person uses to express discomfort or anxiety FINISH THIS