Botticelli’s painting of the Birth of Venus was the first female nude painted and exhibited life size, and in many ways the medieval blueprint for every covergirl to come. It was about the birth of beauty, sexuality and glamour. But what would happen if, instead of washing up on an ancient Cypriot beach on her magnificent scallop shell, the Roman goddess were to arrive naked and vulnerable on a UK beach in the 21st century? This question is the starting point for my show, The Venus Papers.
It’s about lots of things – a theatrical performance combining poetry, humour, art, movement and music, in which I introduce Venus to my world. She encounters customs officers, tabloid newspapers, the male gaze, bars, Primark, life modelling, the perils of breastfeeding in public and something I’ve previously struggled to talk about in my work – the eating disorder I had for approximately seven years. It began on the back of a bus when I was 15 or 16. I was removing and discarding the seeds from a tomato in my packed lunch, then the soft part of the bread in a cob. I progressed to only eating one Weight Watchers boil in the bag evening meal a day. At my worst, I was eating everything in the house, throwing up straight away before I digested it – or I was grilling potato peelings until they were charcoal then throwing up, just in case, doubting the certainty of science and everything I knew about anything.
I did it to lose weight, though I wasn’t overweight, and also because of a complicated net of then unresolved issues. So it wasn’t about the weight, and at the same time it was. Among many other things, personal to my background, I was of course also influenced and affected by the magazines I grew up reading, and female bodies I saw idealised by media and business.
At the height of my illness, I was given yet another food diary in which to record the dietary plan of 500 daily calories I’d committed to, but which instead I filled with confused, fictional scrawl. I fell in the street twice in 48 hours, because of my ludicrous compulsion to speed walk and overexercise, even with the midday sun bearing down on me. Already skeletal, horrific to look at, I had no muscle tone or reflexes to break my fall and was left bruised and bloodied, stitches in my chin and black eye swollen shut.
Several days later, I was sectioned. It was the year 2000 in the height of summer, and I remember being outraged that somebody could have taken my liberty, but of course I’d lost anything like that long before, to the eating disorder and all that went with it.
Being sectioned saved my life. In the lead up to it happening, I remember collapsing in my parent’s kitchen counting peas onto a plate, my legs giving way. I remember chest pains and shrinking vision. I was later told that my potassium levels had sunk so low I’d been days away from a heart attack. Two weeks into my admission I was proclaimed psychotic; for prolonged periods I’d experience time moving backwards and thought I might be able to fly.
Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. At the NHS clinic I came to attend, three of our cohort died of the illness. But talking about any of this, even to state the facts, is loaded. Eating disorders are notoriously competitive (you were always aware of the thinnest person at the clinic) and the drama that can surround them is open to glamorisation, by both sufferer and media. In reality, an eating disorder like this is a race to the bottom of not very much; who can die first or have the worst life. As goals go I’ve had better.
Writing and performing helped me recover. By the end of 2000, I had become a day patient, participating in an immersive rehabilitation programme. I’d dropped out of art school because of my illness, where I’d been a visual artist, having won an award for the highest art A-level mark in the country. But during my treatment, I needed a new conduit and I began to write. It was a form of self-help at first, but then I started to write about other things, initially encouraged by psychiatric nurse and performance poet, Rob Gee. In words and poetry I found the language, medium and platform that had escaped me before. My recovery put me in a stable position and I felt strong enough to share my work with others and started performing at open mic nights.
About a decade after my recovery, I met a painter in a bar and had a go at being Venus. (He is now the father of my child.) Sitting in the nude being stared at and painted for hours on end might seem an odd pastime for a woman with a history of anorexia, but being a life model radically changed my body image.
Scott Bridgwood, a painter of predominantly female nudes, trained as an artist at Chelsea Art School. When we met, he had recently returned to the UK after 10 years living and painting in Rome, where he was fascinated by the gods and goddesses depicted across the city. Here was a range of female bodies, a variety of shapes and sizes but all genuinely beautiful for being completely themselves – and at the same time, via the alchemy of art – very other.
When I saw his work, I saw another possibility. Women’s bodies when represented commercially are all about fragmenting and elongating and packaging and passivity. The stripping of identity. Female nudes throughout art history have also been passive, whereas men’s poses were generally open and active. The women in Scott’s paintings weren’t passive or distorted – they were about accuracy, with no airbrushing. Botticelli’s Venus, too, was anatomically incorrect. In fact she was so out of proportion that she wouldn’t have been able to stand up.
I agreed for Scott to paint me and, sitting naked and stripped of all social facades, for the first time I felt I was just a human, a body, one of us. In the finished painting, all the things I still saw as imperfections were recast into beautiful touches of light and paint. Looking at the paintings, seeing myself through someone else’s eyes, for the first time ever I felt beautiful.
The Venus Papers began life in 2015 as a book (published by Burning Eye ). One of the best things about putting it on the stage has been working with musicians, directors and the designer Kate Unwin. The set for the show, which in part interrogates Botticelli and the male gaze, features reproductions of Scott’s paintings, including some images of me, and one of our daughter. At various times, I interact with them. For instance, I point to a painting of my breasts as I tell the story of a man who came up to me at an exhibition featuring a nude portrait of me, to proudly announce: “I’ve seen your tits.” He was making a power statement but it reminded me of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, under which is written: “This is not a pipe.” Those are not my tits.
- The Venus Papers will be at Off the Shelf festival, Sheffield, on 13 October
