My Working Question- How can I make compelling art that shows the process of my eating disorder and recovery in a way that feels authentic and innovative?

My hours, which I may not have recorded fully

The only artist I was able to find who works explicitly with eating disorders as her subject matter (also does happenings!) – Maria Raquel Cochez

Here is the culmination of my works this semester. Click on the videos to watch them!

I am grateful that I had the time and space this semester to delve deeply into my art and artistic process. It felt so good to uncover the themes that seem inherent to my work and examine them. I finally embraced the fact that I make art about my eating disorder and recovery, it seems like it steeps into all of my art and was present even before I realized it consciously. I also have noticed that BDSM visual themes find their way into my art as well. Maybe that is because BDSM and EDs have much in common in terms of hunger, wanting, restraint, bondage, and punishment. This is a relationship I hope to explore further in my future art.

Here is a humorous video exploring food BDSM

When we were encouraged to research what was interesting to us, I began to dig into the intersections of Eating Disorder and art. I wanted to find art about EDs that was for more than purely symbolic representational or for therapeutic value. I read “Sublime Hunger, a Consideration of Eating Disorders Beyond Beauty” and my mind was blown. I started thinking about how EDs are so much bigger than just appearances and concern about weight. Eating disorders are addictions, they are ritualistic, they are comforting and stabilizing, they are powerful. I want to make art that concerns all the things about EDs that one cannot so easily see. I am also interested in this topic because it is very difficult to find artists that are explicitly working with ED’s as their subject matter. I think they need to be spoken about in more contexts so they can be more deeply understood and have the stigma around them broken down.

With this knowledge, I was able to create the video Water Talk, which depicts me both drinking water and walking into a pool fully clothed. This video showed my descent into the ED behaviors while my other works this semester show my struggles with recovery.

I started this semester’s research thinking that I should create more photoshop self-portraits (which I do enjoy making and I want to work on more in the future). However, I was very glad when Professor Ruby suggested that I push myself by experimenting. From this discussion I set up three experiences: Dinnertime Happening, Blue eating, and Donut Game. The results of the Dinnertime Happening were very exciting, I felt that Maya and I both being blindfolded and her struggling to feed me was a very good representation of my body reconnecting to my brain and the difficulty of it in recovery. It felt exciting to know that I could make art about recovery, not just the worst depths of my ED. That gave me hope. Blue eating felt a bit weak but possibly could be a place of more exploration (what does it mean to eat like a child, play with my food, coerce myself into eating)? The Donut Game was incredibly silly. It was based off a game that I and Gracie (the other player) had experienced as children. I added the hand ties to our version because I knew I would cheat otherwise and it made it adult difficulty. This experiment specifically sparked questions about similarities between EDs and BDSM as it was visually very BDSM. There were elements of restriction and pleasure in this piece that are inherent to both. Does the restriction cause pleasure? I would like to recreate this experiment again with some different foods and people.

I felt as though I should include the video “Leave You,” as it contains themes of containment, loss, interpersonal struggle and bondage. It would be very easy to assign my ED big ideas to this video.

Next, I came up with the idea for “Stomach Punch.” It came from me thinking about how by having an ED for so long I basically might have punched a hole in my gut. EDs do irreparable damage to one’s body and I will be dealing with the physical consequences of mine for a very long time. I did the initial painting in two hours because I did not want to become too precious with it and not want to punch it. When I punched the representation of my stomach and it felt satisfying in a sick way. Then I felt guilty for doing it, and I was filled with some regret. Eventually, during the process of sewing, I was able to overcome this feeling. The process of sewing took so much longer and was much more difficult than the instant relief of the punch, but in the end, I was glad I repaired the painting. The scar is still there, but it also adds something to the piece. This action was a pure metaphor for my ED.

A longtime goal for my art is to move away from self-port portraiture. I want to do this to make my work more universal and less self-centered, which is why I was glad when Maya asked me to paint a large nude of her. Because she wants to give this portrait to her boyfriend I thought it would be humorous to model her pose after Venus of Urbino by Titian. I also included fruit and flowers in the picture because she really likes to eat fruit. I think the image has some type of symbolic meaning about recovery but I haven’t figured that out yet, maybe I will when I finish the painting. I like the challenge of painting and spending the time with it.

I do not feel bound to any medium specifically and am happy I got to play with a variety of mediums this semester. This work felt incredibly productive and powerful and I cannot wait to continue in my senior seminar next year. 

I realized after giving my presentation to my peers I am not making art about eating disorders, but art about the process of recovering from an eating disorder! It is very hopeful for me to recognize that.

Here is what I have done so far:

• Dinnertime Happening (link)
• Water Talk video (link)
• Donut Game. I handed all of the control over to Maya and Julia, who set up the game. Gracie and I competed blindfolded and hands tied in a slightly more difficult version of this traditional children’s game which we had both played when we were younger. It was out of my comfort zone to give all of the artist control to someone else in an artistic concept that I engineered. I don’t usually buy that many sweets at once, and Gracie said that she liked the game when she was little because she got to eat more donuts that she is normally allowed to. It’s interesting that BDSM themes appeared in this piece, and that donuts have such an element of denial, pain and struggle attached to them for many.
• Blue Foods- This was a brief sketch I did to make myself more interested in the food I had to eat. Ruby suggested more iterations of this, with more colors.

• Watched the Amy Winehouse Documentary- She was a Jewish singer with bulimia and a drug addiction. It got me thinking about how we know so many intimate details of singers lives but don’t necessarily know the same about artists.

What I am working on/planning to do:

• Stomach punch painting and happening
• Maya Nude painting
• “Leave You” music video
• Bob for apples? Or another food.
• Maya and Julia want to play the donut game.
• Possibly paint with my mouth and food.
• And I also wanted to use the darkroom, not sure if I have time for that.

I have been feeling so forceful and full of creative energy which is very exciting. I think it’s because I have not been able to really make conceptual art in a supportive environment since high school and it feels very familiar, yet thrilling in its newness. It feels good to let myself make things without exactly knowing why then figuring the “why” out later. There is always a reason that I am driven to create. I am not sure if I have done exactly 12 hours of this but it feels like a lot and like I am pushing myself. 

Talking to Ruby has been an essential part of this brainstorming process. She suggested that I create this word-map that shows how expansive my conceptualization is of eating disorders so that I can see all of the space that exists for me to make art inside of.

I have made two works recently that I think are both very successful beginnings of this investigation of how I can authentically but also curiously represent my eating disorder and recovery. The first project is my video Water Talk. I was more interested in the visuals and wrote the spoken word aspect in about 2 minutes because those words are a part of me they were easy to regurgitate. I think the most important part of this film is the end where I explode out of the water, hinting to recovery. Even more interesting is the idea of sexuality, and I wonder how does sexuality interact with ideas of eating disorders? They are obviously related but I want to mine deeper about how.

After much discussion with Ruby, I sat and thought deeply about how to challenge myself and be experiential. I thought about how trusting others in my art is something I have almost never done. I also do not usually explicitly include food in my work. Combining these elements, I had Maya feed me while we were both blindfolded to create my Dinnertime Happening. An important thing Maya brought up during our discussion after the happening is that I am not making art about spiraling deeper, I am making work about me trying to claw myself out of this hole and recover. The happening had a sense of play and mothering which was really positive for both of us.

The happening was messy and kind of gross which made it more interesting to me.

Going forward I want to create more happenings, as well as creating visceral and tactile pieces. I want to play and punch things and be wild in my art so that I can find out about how I make art and why I do. I think I need to look a little deeper inside of myself to see what is going on, but not let that prevent me from going with my gut. I am very excited.

I have been thinking about it literally all the time, and I have tried to record it with this chart but need to be mroe on top of it. I know I have done more than this.

Here are some other things I have been ruminating on

• Can an eating disorder be separated conceptually from its context (being a woman/ living in america/ the news)?
  • If no how can that be shown in art?
• What about typical/ therapeutic eating disorder art turns me off? Why is it so repetitive?
  • What is it about representing recovery is different from representing the spiral?
• Why is eating disorder art so hard to find? Is it actually more common than I think but just less explicit?

Joel Peter Witkin’s work Courbet in Rejlander’s Pool (1985) is a square, black and white photograph. Surrounded by velvet darkness is the white nude woman who is facing away from the viewer. The only attributes with which we can identify her are her neatly coiled hair, the bracelet on her right wrist, and 3 lines which zig-zag down the left side of her back. She is relatively curvy with arms that slightly sag and creases where her hips meet her waist. The space she is in is unclear, we can see water coming up to the top of her legs, but that doesn’t help the viewer solve the mystery of where she is. The space is defined by the 3 pieces of flower drapery; which her right elbow rests on and which also obscure some of her hips and backside. She also seems to be leaning against a black wall with her right hand resting in front of her face, possibly like she is looking for something. Right above the woman’s head is a line that creates an arch, separating the bottom of the composition from the black empty space at the top of the composition.

Although there is some highlight on the fabric, the woman is the brightest part of the piece by far. Her body rests leaning to the right and her leg can be faintly seen extending to the bottom left of the piece, creating a diagonal composition. While her body moves the eye up and down from the bottom left to the upper right, the lines on her back move in the opposite way and create a sense of balance within the composition. These black lines which seem like a tattoo or a scar are parallel and intersect with each other. The lines mirror her left shoulder blade and follow her spine.

Although the photo is black and white there are some sepia tones around the edges. There is wear on the photo, so much of the space that is black appears scratched, scrubbed or otherwise distressed. Only the woman is rendered clearly with no distortion to the image on her body. The hand of the artist being so visible give the photo a painterly quality, especially because the subject of a nude woman with drapery is so classical. As a viewer, one would expect photos to describe reality so this piece confuses and creates a sense of fantasy more commonly accepted in paintings.

• Black square photo
  • Appears really old because of how worn and distressed it is / sepia
• Woman
  • She is facing the back
  • Curvy (arm sag, hips crease at the waist)
  • She has coiled hair, a bracelet and 3 lines on the left side of her back
  • Her body is the whitest thing in the composition , creating a diagonal w her leg and arm
  • She is also the only thing without scratches, she almost glows
  • The lines go in an opposite way of her body and create balance
  • Lines appear to be a tattoo
• The space
  • Confusing, there is water coming up to the top of her legs
  • She’s leaning forward against a black wall
  • There are three pieces of flower drapery around her , slightly obscuring her also providing depth
  • Over her head is an arch
  • Its a mystery!

I was having trouble finding more sources in the same vein so I went to Mayra at the library. She was so helpful with my research, she already knew what I was looking for because I had talked to her about it previously. So we ignored all of the art therapy results and she showed me how to find and use specific words in Galileo. I found quite a few more interesting articles, some religious and some art based, that I am working on reading now.

After reading Sublime Hunger: A Consideration of Eating Disorders beyond Beauty, I decided that it was time for me to bring to life a project that had been percolating in my brain for a few months. I had Maya meet me on the third floor of the library where I asked her to pose in a square window-like space, asking her to model how her anxiety feels. She has a dance background thus was an incredible model and I loved the photos I was able to capture of her. I wish that we could have done this project nude, maybe next time. I put some of the photos into photoshop and I am very happy with the results I have achieved so far, but it also feels like just the beginning of this series. Photoshop is a good space for me to quickly get ideas together and experiment with no consequences, but I do miss painting. I think it was positive for me to take a break from consuming content for research, to research by creating content, as it gave me the time to consider some of my motivations.

I’m looking at eating disorders through both an in-depth anthropological and a personal lense. While researching this subject in this context, it has dawned on me that all of my art made recently (and possibly ever) had focused on my eating disorders in a subconscious way. I think it is time for me to acknowledge the hidden subject I have been working with, and I do truly feel like this research is the first step. I am fascinated by the religious and philosophical takes on eating disorders I have read so far and I think now is the time for me to absorb information to shape my understanding of my reality. Then I can keep making art, but better.

I wanted to know what art was out there about Eating Disorders to see what other people have done, to feel inspiration or catharsis. But everything I had found prior to this research was cliche and boring. I typed the phrase “eating disorder” into about every search engine that was suggested to our Methods class. There weren’t very many results, so I tried words like “fat” and “thin,” which also came up with limited results. So it was by way of a miracle that I decided to research Joel Peter Witkin for our art talks later in the Methods Class. Within the first page of the book Joel Peter Witkin by Eugenia Perry, there was a mention that he used anorexics as subjects and models in his art, along with other groups that are seen as deviant by society. The art he creates about the female body suggests disorder, drama, and mystery. His work is incredibly inspiring to me and will be in the back of my mind as I continue to create.

I would describe my research process as curious wandering. I let myself move in whatever direction that excites me, but I try to be very deliberate about what I can find at each step. When I am interested in something I become very motivated and that passion is very helpful when the things I am researching seem hard to uncover. I think I am good at asking for help with my research but in the same vein, I may need to be more self-reliant and try harder to internalize better research methodologies. I want to continue tracking my research habits to try to get a better understanding of them. At the end of the day, it is very reassuring to me that I can spend so much time researching art; I know it is the right life work for me.