I had begun looking at the notion of ‘romantic love’ as a manipulative myth and collected imagery and made drawings and collages while reading around this. The idea was to challenge the ideal of a person being incomplete without a partner. Of the many images that appealed to me, I was compelled by photographs found in instructional fitness and workout books where women appeared (to me) to be exhausted by reality and to have retreated within themselves, to be solid and enough. Finding resilience through this disconnect and focus on personal physical strength and mobility.
I became a little obsessed with a woman called Lisa Lyon. She was an actress who became a bodybuilder in the 80s. She wrote this book which encouraged women to build muscle and think independently about work and relationships. She had strong ideas. She was anti-establishment in that way where you paint yourself gold and pose naked. But it was a time when women having muscles was revolutionary and I got very into Lisa Lyon for a while there.
