Years ago, when I was working towards a degree in fine arts, I had to create a body of work for a solo show in the school’s gallery. It was a life-changing experience that I think about all the time.
Back then, my life was really messy. I had experienced a lot of trauma that I hadn’t processed yet, and I was dealing with a lot of issues like body dysmorphia, low self esteem, and not feeling safe being a woman.
Going through puberty had felt like someone had put a target on my back. I gained weight, then lost it (a back and forth battle I’ve continued to struggle with as an adult). I started wearing baggy clothes. I hated the idea of being seen as a sexual object or getting unwanted attention because of the way my body was changing.
The social life of most of the other women in college involved getting pretty together and going out to the bars, trying to pick up guys. I wanted none of that. Ironically, I gravitated towards male friends and roommates so I could blend in with them, “being one of the guys” seemed safer to me.
But part of me still loved the idea of being a woman. I loved how beautiful other women looked. I loved their soft skin and curves. And I was fascinated with the double standards we had as a society, how it was “ok” for men to make sexual comments or enjoy watching sexual content in movies, but popular Christian women like Amy Grant were villianized for looking too “sexy.”
It was ok to wear a bathing suit at the beach, but I had been sent home from school when I was 10 because I had written “can’t touch this” across the back of my skirt. I was told by the principal that my male teacher felt a weird kind of way about it and somehow that was my fault. (Also, shout out to any of you who get the Hammertime reference, lmao.)
As it came time to decide what to do for my Senior Art Show, I was really limited financially by what I could do. Many of my classmates were spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars just on their frames alone. I had a budget of $0.
But, my grandmother had given me and my siblings a sewing machine and my mom had given me a bag of vintage silk neck ties. I had been teaching myself how to alter hand-me-downs because there weren’t a lot of options for clothes that fit my body or style, and, cause of that pesky college student budget of $0. I added a tie to each side of a pair of jeans that had been too small for me, and had the idea to sew some together to create a dress.
I didn’t have any experience sewing clothing or using patterns, and I couldn’t afford a dress form. So, I started sewing and pinning them together onto the shape of my body.
Every single tie had to get tweaked just right. I sewed them together, formed them around my body, “ripped” them apart and resewed them hundreds of times. During that process, I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. At first I didn’t like that, constantly looking at my body and thinking about my curves and how I looked. I wanted the dress to be pretty, and in order to do that, it needed to look pretty on ME. I had a lot of cognitive dissonance kind of thoughts about it. I tried to just think in terms of shapes and aesthetic “rules”.
But, as the dress took shape, I started falling in love with the way it looked, and the way it looked was based on how it fit MY body, and over time, I started to like that too.
I still couldn’t look at my face in the mirror, but man, that body in the reflection and the dress formed to its shape, was starting to look (strictly artistically speaking of course) beautiful.