Lily Dean, 23
I'm 5 feet 2 inches and I’ve always liked being short, because I think it’s cute. I would like to be thinner, but then I also think that a curvy body shape looks nice. It depends what’s natural for your body and, you know, I could starve myself and go down to a size 6 but that wouldn’t be natural for me.
As an artist, I do figurative sculpting and life drawing and when you’re looking at a body – translating it into art – it stops being a body in the way that you, I, or society would look at it. It becomes forms of flesh; you get to know its muscles and bones when you take it out of the subjective. So I think it’s nice to disassociate the body – it’s a more interesting way to look at it rather than just ‘I’m fat’ or ‘I’m thin’, or ‘they’re fat’, ‘they’re thin’.
I think beauty is everything, because for me everything is aesthetic and really visual. Though, right now, I have bigger things on my mind than how I look like relationships, jobs, the future; things that aren’t a guarantee for me at the moment, whereas my look is a given, a constant. For me it’s a source of fun and expression.
