Propped

Image Courtesy of Sotheby’s

“If we continue to speak in this sameness—speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.”

– Luce Irigaray

(French feminist): part of the inscription present in Jenny Saville’s Propped.

Propped, 1992
Jenny Saville

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I caught myself reflexively looking away the first time I encountered the image of Propped—Jenny Saville’s self-portrait which, at $12.4 million, set the record last fall for the most expensive piece by a living female artist ever sold. 

Gone was the flattering recline, the flowing locks, the glorious fantasy of the male gaze I had become so accustomed to. Instead, sat a bald woman… purposefully exaggerated features and full of flesh. So much realness and struggle—it was hard to see. 

For, in her, I found pieces of me I had yet to make peace with. 

While I have come a long way over the years in healing from an eating disorder, occasionally, it still feels as though parts of me are at war and my body is the battlefield. On those days I now turn to Propped, and I dare to look… to challenge… to speak another way.