2022
Oil paint on satin, vinyl, raw fat, crocs, Domino's pizza, marinara sauce, space heaters, Wal Mart bags, Polyfill, mirrors, Amazon notepad, Jesus pen

Baptism: (in the Christian Church) the religious rite of sprinkling water onto a person's forehead or of immersion in water, symbolizing purification or regeneration and admission to the Christian Church. - Oxford Languages (via Google)

Hot Tub Baptism is a marking of a new chapter, a cleansing of purity culture, a challenging of various binaries, and an unraveling of a “right way of being.”

I got baptized as a child; the social pressures and pervasiveness of the white baptist culture in the southern United States left me with little choice, or really any agency at all as God was in control. Cleansed of my original sin, I was left fearful of “falling from grace” and being “impure” again.

I realized much later that the environment thrived on fear and shame. I was watched, judged, and I watched, and judged. It’s how I made sense of “good” and “bad”; the false dichotomy that condemned anything outside of a narrow space of acceptability. The church teaches that anything “of the world” is bad, and that our hearts are deceitful. This contributes to a false sense of threat of anything secular and a distrust for ourselves. There was always anxiety around being “bad,” and to distance ourselves from that feeling, we criticized others’ sins.

One of the ways I was bad is that I am fat. I’ve experienced the projections- lazy, no self control, self indulgent, aren’t productive or efficient- people assume it is a direct result of the sin of idleness. It’s a symbol of consuming and not sacrificing or going without. It’s not necessarily “productive” and it can’t lend itself to capitalism; it’s something to “trim”. I feared being fat and queer as much as I was supposed to fear God.

Because of this, I learned to hide and contain. Both figuratively and physically. This has caused a massive lack of integration in my own life because of the ways in which I had to curate myself, compartmentalize my queerness, compensate socially for being fat, etc. While there was rupture within myself, I saw that fatphobia, transphobia, capitalism, and evangelicalism are clearly integrated.

This work acknowledges the black and white conditioning that still exists in me, in the world, despite pushing back against it everyday. It’s not judging it for still being there, but rather letting it be in a space where you can question it. A space for authenticity, for feeling the pain, for transformation, but most of all, the forgiveness and grace that the evangelical community never provided. It’s a warming and softening of the rigidity. It’s opening up and expanding to look a little deeper. The work allows pleasure, warmth, release, rest, and abundance while also holding mementos of my christian self.

This Baptism is a cleansing of the illusion of cleanness. It’s a spilling out of those containers. A release of restrictions. It’s permission to be.

Heaven is fat.