In 2007, I presented a series of before and after portraits painted at a year’s interval. The subjects of Swollen were seven women who underwent some kind of physical change in 2006--everything from puberty and pregnancy to marriage and menopause, but also including male-to-female sex reassignment surgery and breast enlargement surgery. The series explored whether or not physical changes had anything to do with being a woman.
Swollen didn’t start out the way it finished. Originally, it was more generally about gender, both the male and the female ends of the spectrum. I was looking for three men and three women to sit for me. The participants would undergo male-to-female sex reassignment surgery as well as female-to-male, breast augmentation and pectoral implants, along with two reconstructive surgeries owing to cancer-related losses. It was to be six subjects, twelve paintings, and one year of change.
The only problem was that I couldn’t find the subjects to do this series.
This is a constant struggle in my work, but one that only becomes easier as the years go by. I get more ambitious about what kinds of people I want sitting for me, but, at the same time, I’m building my portfolio and my reputation, making it more likely that the people I invite to participate have heard of me and will choose to lend me their faces and their stories.
In the mean time, a certain amount of chance shapes my work. I have to adapt to not being a southern Californian film crew who has scads of people eager to televise the gory details of their plastic surgery. My limitations force me to be more imaginative.
The kernel of the work that I originally wanted to create included gender identity as it relates to the physical body as well as how physical change affects more than the physical aspects of a person. With that in mind, I re-cast the ideal participant list and came up with a group that was equally effective.
Before And After Breast Enlargement
2006 and 2007
acrylic on bird’s eye
30 x 54 inches (together)
How physical transformations transform more than the physical has long been of interest to me.
I was raised to “never judge a book by its cover.” While on the surface this saying makes a lot of sense, as I got older, I realized that it was one more sophism of the schoolyard, something our parents tell us so that we don’t ostracize a weird-looking classmate. There’s value to that saying in the cruel culture of kids, but I don’t find it useful to function under that mantra as an adult.
I think that, in large part, who we are is based on how other people treat us. And how other people treat us is, at least to begin with, based on visual cues which we give them, including (but not limited to) how we dress.
Beyond this socially derived reasoning, there is a more internal element. When my body is healthy, it’s easier for the rest of me to follow suit. Furthermore, physical changes I have undergone have profoundly affected not only my appearance and well being but also my whole person.
After creating Swollen, I don’t think that womanhood can be pinned on any one physical change that a body might go through, but I do believe in the power of the physical to alter many aspects of the intangible.