KAREN TURNER

Karen Turner is a UK artist whose work celebrates women’s body positivity. Karen creates empowering art that celebrates the beauty and diversity of women’s bodies. Through her artwork, Karen focuses on challenging traditional beauty standards and creating a safe space for fat women to feel loved and accepted. Karen’s artwork often features brightly coloured, vibrant images of women in everyday settings. Her work celebrates the beauty of women’s bodies, showcasing them in a way that is often not seen in mainstream media. Karen has said that her goal is to show women “as they are – beautiful, confident, and with pride.” “ We should all be encouraged to love our own bodies, but we can’t just stop there – we need to be actively working to expose and challenge the barriers. ” With your artwork, you portray a message that needs to be analyzed more deeply - beauty standards. How do you respond to society's expectations for physical attractiveness? Do you think these demands are reasonable or too much? Angry, mostly. Because it’s so overwhelmingly directed at women. That’s not to say that fat men don’t suffer discrimination because they absolutely do, but straight-sized men aren’t judged in the way that women are, and the judgement that women receive is what’s helping to fuel fatphobia. All the magazines telling young girls that cellulite is ugly is what makes them question their own appearance, and so if they think they’re fat when they’re straight-sized, what kind of judgement are they then passing on to others when they encounter people who are genuinely plus-size? They’ve been programmed to fear looking that way themselves, no matter what the body positive movement might have us think. What we need is more fat acceptance. Body positivity is overwhelmingly a straight-sized movement, and based on learning to love yourself no matter how you look. That’s all very well, but what good is that to a fat person who’s fully aware of their own worth but yet is discriminated a