[can be better in landscape on phones]
A few years ago, I would have looked at these photos with pained tears in my eyes. Looking at them for the first time with my current mindset, they made me smile.
I’m happy, and I had fun. I didn’t feel like I needed to fetishise my voluptuousness – but rather show joy, silliness, and reframe beauty as an emotion rather than a physical state.
Growing up, I had a distinct sense of metamorphosis each summer. As though I shed the previous “me” and out crawled a new one.
In hindsight, I think this was how my brain self-righted after a year of masking amongst peers. Eight weeks of just being myself with family, playing video games, swimming in the sea, reading anything put in front of me.
My body was changing too. I remember having to wear training bras sooner than most girls. My first period started the day before I went on a French exchange, the first time I would ever be away from family and my body said “you’re a woman now”.
I went through a phase of rejecting anything pink. Not quite tomboyish, but perhaps closer to the trope of “I’m not like other girls”. In hindsight, I was very much like other girls, but also like other boys, I just felt like a changeling amongst them – a fraud, waiting to be found out. In recent years I sought out an autism assessment, part of my onward journey of self-acceptance and practising self-kindness.
My formative years were under section 28, my family had no issue with LGBTQ+ subjects – but the media’s fetishisation of female bodies and queer experiences, made me feel all the more shameful. Early 2000s lifestyle television was rife with fatphobia. Our PE teacher told us that we’d be dead by 30 if we couldn’t get to a certain stage in the bleep test. My friends and I all agreed that we could just get liposuction or stomach staples, or have our jaws wired shut – like that’s a perfectly normal thing to expect in adulthood as a 10-year old.
My mum used to do body combat and pump classes religiously, and at one point looked like she could roundhouse kick your head off (she still does to be honest, I don’t want to test it). She’s one of the coolest people I know.
I started weight lifting in my 20s to reclaim my physicality. Gaining more weight, but also gaining muscle. I like my soft bits, the solid bits, at least most of the time now.
As I age and notice the greys, I’m excited to grow in a silver mane. Until earlier this year, I had put off getting tattoos until I felt comfortable with my size – worrying that I would fluctuate (whether it be fat or wrinkles) and so would the art. I came to accept that this would always be a possibility, got my first couple of tattoos, and now I feel more me than I’ve ever felt before.
I quit my job at the start of the year to do a few months of “soul searching”. Each passing day reminds me of the metamorphosis I felt as a child.
I’m shedding my old skin and this project is capturing that. I’m enjoying being the goo inside a chrysalis at the moment, I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself when I emerge. Maybe I’ll be a vivacious butterfly, or perhaps I’m in a cocoon and will emerge to be a huge moth!
Rose’s Offering
The marionette crone (a gift from my parents when I was young) represents the wise woman that shouldn’t be feared, but instead celebrated for their knowledge and cunning. She has, and continues to have, fun and mischief.
Join in by contacting me via my contacts page.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 