Body Forensic

Body Forensic traces the artist's own body at full scale, reading its scars and marks as evidence of over 25 years of undiagnosed endometriosis. Two outlines: one from above, headless, mapped with the sites of medical procedures; one in profile, scored with horizontal lines tracking the parts most subjected to imaging. At the top, four small circles for miscarriages, two larger ones for children born. A forensic reckoning with a body finally understood.

This is the first work in the 1:1 series. I made it in the weeks following a hysterectomy that confirmed a diagnosis of severe endometriosis I'd carried unrecognised for over 25 years.

The decision to use a 1:1 outline of my own body was a practical one. It meant I didn't have to make choices distorted by beauty standards or idealisation. It's about me, so it had to be me.

Each decision about what to include was a question about honesty. The breast reduction at 16 took longer to resolve. The endometriosis was less difficult to decide: my scars were still pink and my anger fire red at how I had been treated by the medical field since childhood. It was pouring out of me. The frontal outline is headless, a deliberate severance recording the dissociation of living inside a body that medicine refused to take seriously. Across it, appliquéd and embroidered layers map the sites and sequences of procedures: a medical history that could only be fully understood after the fact.

The miscarriages had to be part of it too. Four small head-shaped ovals for each one, two larger ones for the children who arrived: their head circumferences at birth, a data point from their NHS Red Books. I wanted the piece to hold both without one cancelling the other.

The legs hang loosely from the cloth. Unsupported, unanchored. As the body was, for a long time.