I've spent the last week taking naked pictures of myself- some in underwear, some nude, some with flowers sprouting from my nether regions. These weren’t to send to some long-distance beau but to two women I’ve never met.
Thanks to lockdown, exercise is being discussed more than ever with ‘home workout’ searched on Google in unprecedented numbers and gym equipment selling at record speed. On Instagram we are being tagged in never-ending fitness challenges and our newsfeed is filled with isolated influencers teaching us their regiments and telling us not to ‘waist this opportunity’. Memes joke that everyone will come out of lockdown looking like Wolverine or podgy babies and the pressure to not be the latter feels overpowering.
But for many of us, a stressful period is not the moment to be pressured into ‘perfecting’ our bodies. Does anyone need to be told that a pandemic is a tense, anxiety inducing time? For some, focussing on their mental health means allowing themselves to relax and not be made to feel guilty for behaving less healthily. The constant social prompts to improve can be suffocating and charities like Beat (the UK’s leading charity for eating disorder support) are experiencing an increased need with demand for their helpline up 50%.
As a way to combat the negativity I was feeling towards my own changing physique, I decided to ignore the workout videos and instead force myself to view my body in a different light. So I bought commissions from two artists focused on reclaiming nudity. Mude Threads (Jasmine Moodie) embroiders sketches of her subject’s bodies on clothes, but under lockdown is creating line illustrations (£25) and Are We Nearly Bare Yet (Louisa Foley) turns nude photos into digital works of art (£50).
The first stage of both was to take my naked photos. Shooting the images for an artist instead of a lover immediately changed the way I approached them. In the past, naked photos were about hiding my blemishes, in positions I knew would be alluring, but now my form didn’t need to be sexualised for a male gaze. I posed with my bowl of cereal, with my rolls in view, with cheesy grins, with my favourite vibrator and with my unwashed hair.
I’d put aside 10 minutes, but alongside my recommended glass of wine, I was still going 40 minutes later when my boyfriend returned from his weekly shop. ‘Oooh, are these for me?’ he asked expectantly, ‘Nope’ I replied, as I continued in another room, leaving him mildly confused and concerned.
When I received the final finished products, I loved them both: they were masterpieces and in thinking that about the work I had to consider that maybe the same was true of their subject. Our bodies are remarkable, resilient vessels that we spend too much time belittling and not enough time praising. When we look at ourselves in the mirror or in photos we immediately focus on the flaws but when we look at art we see the beauty. In art, 'naked' becomes 'nude', it transforms into something we admire and appreciate- no one views Botticelli’s Venus and wonders about her cellulite or her workout regime. So instead of looking at yourself through the lens of an Instagram filter, do it through the eyes of an artist.
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