The question I have come up with, but am aware is going to change for now in my project, is, “How can I bring awareness through a platform where people suffering from body image struggles feel safe and have a form of expression?” My project is going to revolve around body image, how it has evolved, and why this whole system has been built around the view of people’s bodies. This is something I want to further investigate because I personally have suffered from several eating disorders and have a distorted relationship with my body, as well as many of the people who are a part of my life, and I have seen the evolution of trends around Ozempic and eating nearly nothing in order to achieve a certain body type. I have different ideas of different forms in which I can test and further research this question but the first intervention I completed was having a poster and different materials that one could use in order to find a way to answer this question, “HOW DO YOU FEEL IN YOUR BODY? WHAT DO YOU SEE YOUR BODY AS? WRITE OR DRAW IT OUT AND PUT IN WHEREVER YOU FEEL IN THE POSTER”. This was done with a small in-class audience, and I hope that when I do it in a larger setting, I can get more information from the participants. I have considered doing it with various questions in public spaces around the school, such as the canteen or the pub after class. I want to do this because, through my research, I found an artist named Ally Z, who speaks about how her experience helped her find her voice: “My art emerges from this personal experience of these eating disorders and how I represent my body within my artworks” (Zlatar). I want to be able to create a format in which people who suffer from body image problems can show the way they represent themselves, and this can also be a useful tool for their own personal therapy.
I learned and received feedback on how to further improve my intervention, what it made people think about while completing this specific activity, and how differently people view their bodies. With the idea for this project what I really hope to accomplish is to make people question why we allow this to be a part of our lives and we normalize commenting on other peoples bodies as well as how we speak to ourselves I also hope for people to not just see the problems that are happening now in the present but for people to understand were it comes from and why it started because if we don’t know where it comes from how will we know how to change it.
I know this is a sensitive subject and I have to be careful, especially since I am in outpatient treatment for my eating disorder. However, I have the help and support I need to keep researching, and I understand it’s a sensitive subject for the community. I want to help because it’s always been a secret, and no one likes talking about it. I may encounter challenges, but I will keep working and ask my tutors and classmates for help to complete this project as successfully as possible.
The starving artist – ally.zlatar (no date) – ally.zlatar. Available at: https://allyz.cargo.site/the-starving-artist (Accessed: 20 May 2026).
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