Stage 2: Fine Art
Unit 6 - Developing Subject Specific Practice 1
There are many causes of Low Self-Esteem. The most common are our parents for instant, our surroundings and media.
PARENTS
How our parents treat us and treat themselves.
Not only parents behaviour towards children may effect they self esteem, but as well when parents themselves struggle with self acceptance, they lead kids to face similar problems.
SURROUNDINGS
Negative peers.
When you are surrounded with people who pressure you, make you uncomfortable or do not respect you. With negative surroundings we have a need to prove them our worth by behaving in the same way or doing same things.
MEDIA
Body image or self-esteem issues are a common problem in a society that promotes unrealistic body ideals. Women’s bodies are constantly objectified in the media.
Celebrities/ influencers on social media constantly promotes how important self love is, but on the same time they use applications to enhance or retouch their photos (not to mention plastic surgeries). Social media have become a platform where many teens and even adults edit their photos to cover up their self-esteem. The editing of celebrities have had a major influence on the idea of what beauty is, allowing many applications become so popular over the past few years. One of those applications is Facetune where you can edit, enhance, and retouch photos on a user’s portable device. Every day around 1 million photos are edited through this app, including photos of the most famous person in the world - Kim Kardashian.
In fact, the Kardashian family asked why they owe this popularity, replied that they offered a body image that the world was not used to seeing, that it gave young women self-esteem. For a family presenting their lives in a reality show, which is arranged by a stage design and a professional team of make-up artists, etc., it is hard to believe that they give help instead of fake image.
When puberty comes around and our bodies start to change, they don’t change into what we see on magazine covers or in music videos. This can lead to feeling unattractive and inadequate, on top of the profound disempowerment that comes with seeing your body as an object for others to behold.
“85% of girls aged 8-10 believe they are overweight and 45% have already started dieting.”
IN THE PAST DECADE, THE NUMBER OF GIRLS UNDER THE AGE OF 10 THAT ARE HOSPITALISED FOR EATING DISORDERS HAS DOUBLED.
Additionally Dianne Neumark Sztainer in her book ‘I’m like So Fat!’, reports that 50% of teen girls and 30% of teen boys practice unhealthy eating behaviours to lose weight (vomiting, skipping meals and using laxatives).
The University of Washington’s Teen Health and the Media webpage reports that 53% of girls surgery were unhappy with their bodies, a number that rises to 78% by the age of 17.
Every age group may experience depression, anxiety, anger and even self-loathing as a result of body image issues.
To continue my project I decided to apportion the subject into three stages:
SELF LOVE
STAGES:
INFANT: (write about experience)
- How it starts (insecurities)
- The environment (where it happens)
- Early stages of bad mental health
TEENEGER:
- Peer pressure
- Role models
- Social media
- Make up (females)
- Mental health
ADULT:
- Trying to stay young
- Social trends
- Pressure on themselves
- Trying to act their age?
Question that I asked myself and others:
When you want to upload photo on social media, how does the whole process look like? How many photos are you taking? Are you choosing the best?
Are you getting upset when your pictures don’t look like you wanted?
What self love meant to you?
Why is it important to you? / If not why?
Are you practising self love in your daily life?
- Yes: What do you do?/ Is it easy?
- No: What’s stoping you from practising those things?
What experience brought you to this stage of your life?
Did you ever compare yourself to others? (social media, press, society)
When compering yourself started?
Any insecurities? / Would you change anything in your look (body, face, hair, etc.)? / Your insecurities are because of social media?
Why do you think you have any kind of insecurities?
How many times did you said “From tomorrow I’m starting to be kind to myself, work on my feelings and my self love?”
First time that you felt not good about yourself (physically)?
Why we never happy about our looks and why?
In your opinion: young people should have free access to social media? / Would you let your kids to feel the same way as you feel now?
Few words from me and additional research I’ve done:
My studio work is based on self acceptance. It is very disturbing that most of the time women prefer to sabotage themselves and/or critic their appearance instead of understanding how amazing each and one of them is.
I did a lot of research to gain my knowledge and I quickly understood that I did not focus on elder people in my research that much, however that changed when I briefly heard about “Whisper, the Waves, the Wind” (1983-1984) by Suzanne Lacy during the context seminar called “Ethnography and Socially Engaged Practise”.
In the performance, group of women over the age of 65 sits together at the tables, and discuss their lives, relationships, their hopes and their fears.
Women talk openly about young people finally understanding how important older people are in their lives and how they should be encourage to live fully at every age. Older people serves as role models to suggest that life is full of richness and opportunities, and because “they are closer to death makes the living more important.” With the age you gain more wisdom and experience. Instead of compering ourselves to created by others standards and facing hard times on our own, we should talk and listen to the ones who can laugh at life because they have already made it!
With the age you realise significance of other things than beauty, and we should encourage older to share that with younger, to decrease the struggle.
I watched an online interview where older women where sharing their thoughts regarding young women in todays world. They were not sure if they would have coped. With all the opportunities and technology that we have, this should be a world of pleasure, but instead it is the world of pressure. The pressure of being perfect mother, wife, friend, boss. The pressure of having perfect body, home or family.
We are able to reach those things, but will it be for us or for others?
During my research I found one of the artist who did an amazing work that represents our social situation. Anna Uddenberg made a sculpture of woman who’s taking picture of her ass, and called it ‘Venus of our times’. What was a bit of joke at the beginning, led to conclusion and met the reality of our times.
With my research I read few books like:
‘Introduction to the psychology of self esteem’ by Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, is touching the subjects like positive psychology and mental health. He coined the term and scale of love of life.
‘Consuming life’ by Zygmunt Bauman, talks about the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life - politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences.
'It is not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be’ by Paul Arden,
He is the world's top advertising guru, and he offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, communicating, playing your cards right, making mistakes and creativity, all notions that can be applied to aspects of modern life.
‘The Cult of the Amateur’ by Andrew Keen, who talks how all of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy.
‘Concept of the self’ by Anthony Elliott, is an accessible and invaluable introductory text for students in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies and gender studies.
‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ by Susie Orbach, is exploring our love/hate relationship with food. She describes how fat is about so much more than food.
All of the books were very interesting and worth reading. Each book touch the subject in one or different way but I came to the conclusion that no matter how much I will read and how much time I will spend understanding the subject, it won’t matter.
I do understand why this works like that and why we get cough up in this never ending cycle. What I’m not going to understand is why with all the knowledge that we have we still think that is it okey. That all that struggle with self-esteem is covered up with fake personas and smiles. Why so many people is not trying to even changing, but adds additional fashions that cause more trouble?
From first idea of documentary film to photographs of women, to then nude photographs showing the reality of women body.
I was thinking of only showing only realistic body image, but I changed my mind.
The reason why is that I planned to take photos of people that I know but I’m not related to.
No emotions involved, no close relationship between us.
Everything changed when I was telling my family about the project and about everything that I learned. My mom and my sister were really involved into discussion and gave me a lot of opinions and their struggles. Obviously I knew about lots of them but it was good to hear it again. We talked hours and I opened up about my insecurities, I told the stories that bothered me for years. The lack of self-acceptance to myself is scary and that’s why I asked my mom and my sister to be my models. Because of that connection between us.
Breastfeeding women and woman after 50s with menopause and big C-section scar.
At that point, those magazine photoshopped women are nothing like real life women.
With photographs, there’s going to be audio, with me talking about my sister and my mom, about me and my experience in this subject. I will say all the stories at loud to add more sense into the project, to add more meaning.
The project that supposed to be about women in general, become more personal and I really like it.
Bibliography:
Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming Life. United Kingdom. Polity Press,
Keen, A. (2008). The Cult of the Amateur. United Kingdom. Nicholas Braley Publishing,
Orbach, S. (1998). Fat is a Feminist Issue. United Kingdom. Arrow Books,
Elliott, A. (2001). Concept of the Self. United Kingdom. Polity Press,
Arden, P. (2003). It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be. United Kingdom. Phaidon Press Limited,
Unknown. (2016). ‘Venus of our time’ this sculpture emphatically comments on contemporary narcissism. [online], kobieta.gazeta.pl.
Available at: http://kobieta.gazeta.pl/kobieta_ekstra/1,155242,20195320,smieszne-czy-straszne-wenus-z-fejsa-hitem-berlinskiego-biennale.html
Unknown. (2014). 8 Common Causes of Low Self-Esteem, Taking Charge of Your Own Worth. [online], Good Choice, Good Life
Unknown. (2018). Girls Ages 6-18 Talk About Body Image. [online], Allure.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mP5RveA_tk&t=2s
Casanova, A. (2014). Beauty and Body Image, That’s what she said. [online], Soul Pancake.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Lz6tYh4esY&t=33s
SELF EVALUATION FORM
UNIT:6
LEVEL:5
STUDENT NAME: Aleksandra Ogorek
With reference to the Learning Outcomes for the Unit write a summary or bullet point list of what you consider to be:
The key achievements of your work on the unit (maximum 100 words)
The key achievements of my work on the unit was leaving my comfort zone. It wasn’t hard to open up in front of my family, we know about each other everything, but going to the public and sharing my and my family experience was something completely new, and I really enjoyed that.
The most useful things that you learnt (maximum 100 words)
I would say that the most useful thing that I learnt during unit 6 was tolerance. Tolerance to people who struggle with their insecurities and to people who accept themselves. The most important thing is how we feel about our appearance, we should learn how to be thankful. The issues that you found challenging and how you set about overcoming them (maximum 100words)
The biggest issue for me was recording my voice. I’m very uncertain of the tone of my voice and especially the accent. I wasn’t when I came to England, but lately, so many people are starting to judge my accent that sometimes I’m even scared to speak up. I am trying to overcome this, because it’s normal for me to have an accent, as I’m from different country and that’s why I decided to record my voice and not let people to humiliate me and make me feel bad about something as silly as this.
List what you now consider to be the main areas for development that you intend to focus on in the next unit? (maximum 100 words)
Through my art I want to show people what’s important to me, and encourage them to speak up about certain topics. Not only regarding our bodies, but also about our rights, beliefs and our planet. I know that I want create art that will give people awareness and be part of the change, and I will focus on that in the next unit, although I do not believe that will happen straight away, but hopefully one day.
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