Maria Rosati Verified

With these sequential screen prints, I am asking, “Who can I blame?” for the feelings I hold towards my body. With every layer, I am looking for an answer - looking to point the finger at someone or something for making my fatness worthy of hatred. Each layer and subsequent print adds to what came before it, with the final totalling 40 layers. As they build and become more intense, the borders begin showing more evidence of the process. These moments are individual and personal, but not unique. We have all seen these messages, said or heard these words, and associated ‘fat’ with ‘bad’. We all have moments that have made us question the worthiness of our bodies and the love we’ve been told they do not deserve. These layers are comprised of scenes from pop culture, hand-drawn images, and written text calling out specific and significant moments that have influenced my view of my body. With layering acting as a method of accumulation, adding and obscuring each print and what’s underneath, it becomes more than one isolated moment or one single reason. It’s all these things at once, shaping and changing who I am and who I have become.

These prints, consisting of 25 photos of myself in bathing suits as a child, speaks to the shift I experienced from when I was comfortable in a bikini and when I was told I shouldn't be. As a fat person, bathing suits hold heavy connotations. We often hear people speak about preparing themselves for swimsuit season, restricting calories, and heading to the gym to prepare their "bikini bodies" as if their current bodies won't be acceptable to be seen with such little coverage. A bathing suit means exposing my body to ridicule, giving away the comfort of clothing, and sharing the secret of my fatness. In a bathing suit, I cannot hide. But there was a time before I thought about how my rolls spilled over my bikini bottoms, and I didn't obsess about how I looked in a bathing suit. I just wore one. Printed using CMYK photo-intaglio, the impression of the 100 plates making each image is physically pushed into the paper, relating to the physical and psychological impression fatphobia had on me at such a young age. Bikinis were no longer just bikinis - they were a magnification of my fatness, of the separation between the other kids at the pool and me.

I have always hesitated to name these feelings I hold as grief, reserving the word for mourning those who have passed. But grief has many different faces, and I do not only grieve those who I have lost; I grieve the things that have been left behind, that have changed, that could have been, and that I never had. I grieve for my father's time away from home, but I do not think of him or my childhood with sadness because of it. I grieve for my relationship with my brother before we grew up and apart and how things have changed since our parents divorced. I grieve my Nonna's cookies that she no longer remembers how to make. I grieve my baby blanket, my first tangible experience of loss. But through all of this, I still look at these memories and relationships removed from my mourning. Grief can be all-encompassing, existing between empty and full as we remember and cherish what we have lost. Printmaking elicits the process of remembering. With screen printing, the image is burned into the material to be used to print, remaining there until you wash it away and leaving behind a ghost of what it was. This act of printing, of having and using, losing and staining, speaks to the nature of these experiences I grieve. We have, we live, we lose, and we remember. There is a difference between missing something and mourning it, as explored through these prints, and that difference is where I name my grief.