Digital, Ink, Graphite, Gold Pen
The theme for my third project in my Drawing II class was
“Consumptive Collections”
We had several prompts to choose from, and I picked documenting everything ingested in one day. This was open to interpretation, but I went literal with what all I ate in 24 hours. From these series of sketches and collages from our documentation, we had to interpret them into a series of meaningful drawings.
I chose to focus on consumption in the sense of fatness and food. Being fat in an extremely fatphobic and diet centric society basically means that food should be only used as a tool to make yourself smaller, and that anyone that sees you eating must make assumptions of your dietary history and come to conclusions about why you are the size you are, thus may ridicule you or treat you as less of a human being.
I knew I wanted to include three things in this series: representing what I ate as a sort of motif, using insults associated with fatness somehow, and using a style different from my own in order to serve the projects criteria of experimentation.
One of the art styles I’ve been studying in my classes is Art Nouveau, and I felt it would be perfect for this series. The women in art nouveau posters are beautiful, at an acceptable weight level and fit perfectly into neat borders and frames. I had an idea of a fat body, bursting out of the frame, emphasising her form, her role outside of societal beauty standards and contrasting the idea that food should only be used to make yourself smaller.
Due to time restraints I could not use color, but decided instead for the focus to be on line, contours of form. I made use of variety in line weight, as well as implied lines, things significant to Art Nouveau style.
After making sketches of fat women in this style I still felt something was missing, and after some experimentation I literally cut out a head of a cow and pasted it onto my sketch. I decided to replace human heads with animal ones to represent the dehumanization people give fat bodies, as well as to serve for illustrated insults. The cow and pig are two common animals used to belittle and dehumanize fat women.
Lastly, the icons in their halos represent my literal consumption, as well as the plants/flower crowns. The pig piece is based on chicken strips and fries that I had from Whataburger. She is surrounded by a pattern of life stages of potatoes and life stages of chickens, wearing a flower crown of various stages of potato plant flowers, holding two stems of Bluebonnet flowers, representing the state flower of Texas where Whataburger was founded. The cow is based on my meal at Chipotle, her icons symbols of ingredients used in many of their recipes, her crown various stages of an avocado plant flowering and grasping two stems of Rocky Mountain Columbine flowers, the state flower of Colorado where Chipotle was founded.
This piece was very triggering to make, I had several anxiety attacks during the process due to flashbacks of trauma and abuse surrounding food and my body. I was mostly dreading critique, having to explain all of these things to a room of thin able bodied people, but I am happy to say that my pieces were well received during critique. One of my favorite comments from a peer was a response to other comments saying that their bodies while fat were beautiful, and she said there's no need to justify their being with beauty, they didn't have to be beautiful to look at, its wonderful that they could simply exist and take up space.
Sadly the printing did not work as planned, the printers at UNT are made for rolls, not sheets and thus I had lots of complications, and the cow was not able to be printed properly ): so I'm only sharing a photo of the final Pig piece. I do plan on redoing them PROPERLY ( there is no lightbox at UNT for some reason so I'm going to literally drive all the way to Plano to use the one at Collin as opposed to printing my sketch on my nice paper and inking over it as i did the first time) and I will also be selling limited edition prints of these if you are interested, keep an eye out :)
2087
vaporwave
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