Virginia Hewitt
Acrylic on canvas
40 x 40 cm
My paintings begin with bodies awaiting transformation. Using pre-operative imagery associated with abdominoplasty and cosmetic surgery, I paint women at a threshold of change. The work I create is clinical and brutal, taking an invasive look at women’s bodies for documentation and assessment before surgery. I approach my subject as portraits of lived experience, framing the body as a site of interaction.
This project was inspired by my interest in the body not only being presented as an ideal form, but as a site of accumulation. Skin carries history and evidence of experience, with a particular focus on women’s bodies. Weight, childbirth, aging, and illness become visible on the surface of the body long before any surgical incision occurs. In this work, I frame the subject closely to scrutinise the marks at the surface of the skin that are commonly targeted for correction, such as folds, fat, asymmetry, softness, and stretchmarks are treated as records of life rather than imperfections, a “surface memory record” of experience. My paintings examine the strange overlap between medical photography and portraiture. Clinical images are designed to flatten emotion and standardize the body for evaluation, yet vulnerability persists within them as a voyeuristic fascination emerges from the onlooker. By translating these source images into paint, I slow down the act of looking and reintroduce intimacy, ambiguity, and subjectivity into these forms.