“It was going through the journey of experiencing an eating disorder and then learning to love my body that really drove home for me how impactful and life-changing art could be.”

I remember a day in my high school art class when my teacher gave us a lesson on how to draw with charcoal. I chose to draw a photo of Samuel Becket and for some reason I knew I needed a bigger piece of paper. I obtained one and was able to draw Becket’s portrait as if I’d been drawing portraits for years - and the paper was still too small. The next day my teacher cleared the wall of the storage room, asked the photography teacher if she had any backdrop paper, and provided me with a 7ft x 5ft surface to create my second charcoal piece ever. I found that I had a natural propensity for drawing really big. I found a photo from National Geographic of an African tribe that I recreated at 5ft x 4ft which landed me in the Best of Oregon High School Art Show at PSU. The wife of the COO for the Portland Trailblazers saw my work and was so taken by it that she recommended that I be commissioned to draw Clyde Drexler’s retirement gift. I got to be on the court during half time when they presented him with the 5ft x 3ft portrait I created. It felt so rewarding having the entire stadium cheering for my art. I went on to attend Pacific Northwest College of Art for two years, briefly explored other avenues of work and those experiences reaffirmed for me that art is my true calling.

Meanwhile, as a female growing up in 90’s America, I was overly preoccupied with my diet and body size. I learned from my family, friends, and society at large that what I looked like was of the utmost importance. I expended inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to be thin. My body was not built to be thin. I fought an uphill battle, unsuccessfully dieting and over-exercising until in 2019 I decided I would quit sugar. For the first time in my life I was thin and I loved it. It lasted for a year. I went back to eating sugar and that’s when my preoccupation became a binge eating disorder (BID). My return to sugar paired with the social isolation of a global pandemic turned into spending my days eating, stopping only to shower, sleep or go for a daily walk. I gained a lot of weight and a crippling fear that I would get, God forbid, actually fat. Out of desperation I joined a 12 step group for food addiction and found the community and social accountability to quit not only sugar this time, but flour too. I didn’t realize that I was in, what was for me, a socially acceptable eating disorder group. We weighed and measured our food and restricted every meal. I eventually began feeling hungry all the time. Since this wasn’t a medically informed group, I received dangerously inaccurate information. I wasn’t eating enough and I passed out one day just standing up. I quit the group and went straight back to BID, gaining  all the weight back and then some. I entered outpatient treatment for BID, worked with a therapist and nutritionist, and made healthy progress on my body image and relationship with food. However, it was art that ultimately brought true recovery.

At the beginning of the COVID 19 lockdown I was living with a partner who provided me with all the supplies I would need to create with a medium I had long been curious about: alcohol ink. It was abstract and quick to create with. I could easily create without judgement and I didn’t have to think about selling it. Alcohol ink helped me rediscover my passion for art. 

Fast-forward to 2022, when a stranger reached out on facebook after seeing my work. His name was Jamie Mustard and he would go on to become a close friend and collaborator. He was impressed with my work and wondered why I wasn’t further along. We decided to meet and he interviewed me about my life’s journey. As I was describing my struggle with binge eating disorder I came to the realization that I wasn’t farther along because I wasn’t creating art that was personal. 

Jamie helped me develop a plan for a body of work that would highlight my natural propensity for working large, delve into the fat-phobia that held me hostage for the majority of my life, and make a case for breaking free from societal expectations. I began the project a year later and a year after that I had finished the forty 7ft x 5.5ft mixed media works that now make up the series entitled “Obese Landscapes”

I continued treatment as I created, which included giving myself permission to eat whatever I wanted. I got fat, well, “small fat”, and it wasn’t the nightmare I had feared it would be. I began appreciating my body where it was: a vessel that made it possible to create, feel the warmth of summer sun, listen to birdsong, and taste an endless variety of flavor. And one day I realized I wasn’t bingeing anymore. It had been weeks, months even, I couldn't remember. I had effectively recovered from binge eating disorder and was genuinely in love with my body. 

I began creating because I was naturally talented and enamored with the process of it, but I was too young to understand how emotionally impactful art could be. It was going through the journey of experiencing an eating disorder and then learning to love my body that really drove home for me how impactful and life-changing art could be. As I create now I convey the beauty in the human form, even at the most extreme version of what society deems ugly, and show individuals that they can love their body in the passionate and yet neutral way that one loves nature, no matter their shape or size.

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