CAREN GARFEN

THE SECRET LIFE OF AN EATING DISORDER, 2018

The musical box ‘Hidden Movement’ and the miniature doll’s house ‘The Secret Life of an Eating Disorder’ are a bridge between these past struggles for bodily autonomy, today’s battles with self-perception and the public’s assessment of the female figure. Garfen’s works are representations of stories of self-doubt, distorted body images and the imposed pressures from social media and the beauty industry. Her work demands the dismantling of predefined norms of the female body and thus function as a beacon of awareness and hope for body positivity.

Curators Aline Lara Rezende & Julia Hartmann in ‘Nothing Less!’ 2020

Continuing the theme of eating disorders, work was created for an art installation at The Knitting & Stitching Shows. One of the main features of this artwork was a one-twelfth scale dolls house in which the bedroom was furnished with a miniature version of a hospital bed, along with a tiny drip stand, weighing scales, stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. In the gallery, a life-size bedroom/hospital room was created as a close replica of the miniature dolls house bedroom and was furnished with a full-size hospital type bed; actual medical equipment was adapted by using textiles and hand stitch to create individual artworks. The dolls house sat inside the installation as an indication of scale; inside the dolls house was a miniature house (1-48th scale), and within that is a really tiny house barely a millimetre high.

Caren’s artwork invites you to a raw and harrowing viewpoint of eating disorders in a way that isn’t so confrontational, clichéd, triggering or horror movie-esque. It invites you to decipher your own feelings about the subject. Patient with eating disorder, in recovery

This meticulously crafted doll 'Mia' was a commission, and created by Julie Campbell who designed and made the wonderful dolls for the television adaptation of The Miniaturist which was screened on BBC1 in late December 2017

The art room was dedicated to Alex, a talented art student who passed away after suffering from a complex eating disorder. On the easel stands a one-twelfth scale version of a self-portrait that she painted in oils. The framed pictures and the miniature portfolio have copies of her artworks in them. The wallpaper in this room has particular significance as the design was copied from a hospital bed-sheet which Alex had sewn with red thread. Each satin-stitched red mark represented a period that she had missed…I called it ‘Menstrual Wallpaper’.

The kitchen is filled with cookery books. The person with an eating disorder has a keen interest in the baking of cakes and scones and will happily share the results of her labour but will not eat them herself.

Clean Eating Room (detail). A miniature diet book sits on the table. Fruits and vegetables are being scrubbed with cleaning products in a place where diets are taken to an extreme level, in a world where food is either ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’.

Measurement: 81cm x 63cm x 34cm

Process: Hand stitch, printing

Materials: Textile, silk threads, paper, dolls house, miniature accessories

Exhibited in:

What’s Going On Upstairs, The Knitting & Stitching Show, Alexandra Palace, London (2018)

What’s Going On Upstairs, The Knitting & Stitching Show, The RDS, Simmonscourt, Dublin (2018)

What’s Going On Upstairs, The Knitting & Stitching Show, Convention Centre, Harrogate (2018)

Nothing Less! 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage, Austrian Cultural Forum, London (2019 - 2020)