Oil on canvas, mixed media plaster sculpture with beeswax
Undergraduate
Anatomical intricacy can be something separate from the physical trauma that can be associated when confronted with the internal body. The structures beneath our skin create and dismantle who we are as individuals. Throughout history to our current day, women have been subject to unjust standards that infect our physical and emotional wellbeing. As a result of a patriarchal society, women’s healthcare is still decades behind men’s. Similarly to the lives of thousands of women, I’ve only ever viewed my body with disgust, constraining myself to the harsh realities of what it means to be a woman. Through the lens of body dysmorphia, I investigated my own perception of beauty in a life-sized self portrait in the vein of Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus. The art of anatomy embraces the extraordinary beauty of how those structures inform our identities. Evidently, my work draws attention to the necessity of medical illustration in visualizing the unknown and accentuates the intertwined relationship between science and art, proposing that one cannot exist without the other.
