Hannah
Participatory Portrait
She was
unworthy
Hannah grew up learning that being fat supposedly meant certain things were not for her. Over time, that message shaped how visible, desirable and deserving of care she believed she was allowed to be.
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Hannah has been fat since she was a teenager. As she got older, she became increasingly aware of how differently the world seemed to treat thinner women.
She was overlooked, excluded and made to feel as though being fat said something about her character. Her dad told her she would have no friends because of her size, and over time she absorbed the idea that she should expect less from other people too.
That affected the relationships she accepted and the way she saw herself. She learned to make herself smaller emotionally, even when her body could not be.
Now, Hannah is working from a very different place. She has learned to accept herself without needing to become thinner first, and to recognise that her body was never proof that she deserved less.
THE DESTRUCTION
Invisible
About the Work
2026
Acrylic on canvas
Hannah described feeling increasingly invisible because of her body, as though certain things simply were not meant for her. So I physically sanded sections of her portrait away, making her disappear from the canvas.
Across what remained, I wrote “NOT FOR YOU” to reflect the message she had absorbed: that love, attention, clothes, visibility and even being treated well were things reserved for somebody else.