our botanical bodies

Our Botanical Bodies is a project that I created with strangers in London, through which I’ve painted plants on different women aged 23-88 years old in support of body-neutrality. I started this project in 2017, the same year that I started work as a life model for art classes. The first class that I modelled for was a class with Free Form Life Drawing ran by Dan Whiteson. Sat nakedly in a room full of people for the first time, I listened to Dan tutoring his students on how to draw the complexity of the human form as a series of lines and shapes. I found comfort in the idea of the appearance of my body being nothing but a series of lines and shapes, with no connotations of attraction or worth attached to them. It was liberating to realise that the boobs I deemed ‘too saggy’, or the belly I deemed ‘too round’ couldn’t be ‘too anything’ to be pencil marks on paper, which is all the importance they had to the 30-odd people drawing me. Working as a life model, as well as attending life drawing classes to draw, has helped me to practice viewing bodies as form without habitually adding importance to their appearance. Our Botanical Bodies was created in recognition of this outlook. I am inspired to paint plants as they tend to be something that we accept and appreciate in their varying shapes and sizes and colours. I aim to draw attention to the interconnectedness of our bodies and nature.

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

- Ram Dass

Film