SAVILLE: I made that picture a long time ago. We know that representation matters, but when you see the kind of representation you didn’t even know you wanted, it can be really meaningful. And here I saw fat bodies, unadorned and unapologetic. She doesn’t have any rolls or wrinkles or stretch marks. In most art, when a woman is fat, she’s not actually that fat-she’s just sort of plump. It was the first time I’d ever seen a body that looks like mine in an artwork, and it was incredible. I was just walking around, then I looked up, and I saw this huge triptych that shows a fat woman-a woman with her breasts sagging, with stomach rolls. ROXANE GAY: I first saw your work at the Broad Museum. Visualizing Climate Change: Artist Michael Wang in Conversation with Scientist Nick LutskoĬopyright Law and Art: Legal Scholar Amy Adler in Conversation with Artist Jill Magid
Gay, who is based in New York and Los Angeles, chatted over Zoom with Saville, who is based in Oxford, on the subject of fatness and feminism, as well as their shared commitment to nurturing a younger generation of women writers and artists.
For Gay, the cutoff at that size speaks to the degree of fatness that society is willing to accommodate, and to the limited options that people size 29 and up often have. While figures who are plump by today’s standards have featured prominently in classic paintings by Titian, Rubens, and others, these women are what Gay calls “Lane Bryant fat,” a term she coined to refer to people who shop at the plus-size retailer that sells clothing generally up to size 28. This involves challenging the standards of beauty codified in images, be they art or ads, to which women are often pressured to conform. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space.” British artist Jenny Saville’s powerful works celebrating the beauty of fat women are among her most well-known her trailblazing feminist paintings helped chart a path for women painters who talk back to the female nudes that dominate art history. She considers fatphobia a feminist issue, writing, “As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. In her 2017 book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay relates stories about the rudeness she often encounters when seated next to strangers on a plane. Roxane Gay, a prominent author, has been confronting the pervasive bias against fat women. Jenny Saville Illustration by Scott Chambers