Why I use My Body in My Work and How it's Important.

I use my body in a lot of my work in my current practice. I was painting the nude to try and feel like my body fits somewhere and is accepted by everyone else and trying to feel normal in terms of body shape. I wanted to try and love myself in my own skin. It was rather selfishly me trying to be happy within my own body. I am not necessarily comfortable sharing my body in my practice with the rest of the world as a part of me feels like I am a fraud If I'm not trying to step out of my comfort zone and practice what I preach which is acceptance and liberation within your own body. now that I have explored that side of my work, I believe it is an important part of my practice to somehow incorporate myself within my projects. In terms of why I think it's important to represent my theme within my practice, there is one simple answer to this. There isn’t enough of it. And there never will be. With cultural beauty standards constantly changing it is going to be hard for people to fit into these ideals and as we expand on being digitally based and always using social media (which is only going to get bigger) that means it will be insanely difficult to get away from the ongoing reminder that you need to be a certain way for the rest of the world. With the world being how it is with the internet, there is no stopping anyone from finding information and nothing stopping our heads fuelling the self-hatred of our own bodies. I have been told a couple of times that I should move on from this theme as it's been done too many times before, but I feel like that is a cop-out if I just decide to stop when it is an ever-growing beauty standards production line getting bigger and bigger.