DEGREE SHOW 2018

These gymnastical, graphite drawings are a dialogue between the ideal body and the uncanny body, or simply, the beautiful and the ugly. The strangeness and dehumanisation that occurs as a result of uncanny displacements and distortions applied to the female breaks down their inherent beauty so that they no longer meet the contemporary ideal, becoming a form that is surreal, fantasised and almost monstrous instead. These distortions made to the ideal offer a commentary on the notoriously rigid and superficial beauty standards which exist for women today and reflect how contemporary culture constantly manipulates and distorts body image. The media, in the Twenty-First Century, has caused young women’s views to become clouded and expectations of beauty have become skewed. Providing society with images of models and celebrities with unrealistic body types everyday leave women feeling the need to meet the standards portrayed in the image, stripping them of their inherent confidence and fuelling their obsession with perfection. In this series of drawings, I am responding with personal expressions of unease and anxiety to the contemporary socio-cultural pressures to be toned, slender and youthful.