Rebecca D Harris,
Forlorn
(detail), 2013
Rebecca Harris is an artist who graduated with a degree in Fine art from Plymouth College of Art in 2011. Her work reflects her personal experiences in life recently focusing more so on the fat female body which developed from Rebecca being due to have gastric bypass surgery in 2012. However she turned away from the idea due to the extremes she would be putting her body through just to look normal and cancelled the surgery as she felt more reconnected with her identity as a ‘fat woman’.
She then placed all of her studying and work into her experiences living in a fat female body with her main interests in the medical and social view of normalising the fat female body.
Rebecca D Harris, drawing of a medical illustration image depicting excess skin, 2013
Rebecca uses textiles and found objects as her main materials when making three-dimensional works. She feels particularly textiles show a similarity in some ways to the materiality of the human body representing the act of destruction and creation in both processes of using textiles and body modification.
I find Rebecca’s work very interesting not only because of her mediums and context within the medical field, but because of her strong views on the female body, something which I plan to research into further within my studies.
References:
Fig 1. Harris, R. 2013. drawing of a medical illustration image depicting excess skin. drawing. Plymouth.
Fig 2. Harris, R. 2013. Forlorn (detail). Textiles. Plymouth.
Harris, R. 2013. Rebecca D Harris. [online] Available at: http://www.rebecca-harris.co.uk/ [Accessed: 3 Dec 2013].
Kath Howard 