Student Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

These photographs are taken from the series Your Mind & Body Is All That You’ve Got II, which were made in 2013 and follow on from previous work that looked at learning to accept yourself through the act of taking self portraits. In 2012 I noticed that my body was beginning to show symptoms of gradual wear and tear and realised that it was only going to become more apparent as I age. In the same year I came across several articles about women who had learned to love themselves in their fifties and sixties. I have had a negative relationship with myself and my body for most of my life, but through consciously taking self portraits in 2009 I started to develop a better connection between what I saw of myself in a photograph and what I felt comparatively in real life. Reading the articles I knew that I still had a longer journey to go through before being happier with who I was, but I did not want to wait until the ‘prime’ of my life was over. The photographs were taken on days when I felt an emotion or a surprising lack of it towards myself, my body and life in general. They change between hiding and revealing, depending on my feelings during the shoots.