I struggled with writing this paragraph!

So often in my career as a professional western model, I am SEEN and not HEARD. Now, here, I’ve been given a chance to speak, to write something ... I’ve no idea what to say. This says a lot: women’s bodies are and always have been cultural sites of violence and silence. They so often are ‘given’, wordlessly, to the worlds around them; consumed and moulded by society in ways they have no say over.

By giving our image (or nude body) to an artist we express an agency and a form of control over our bodies. Age does wither us! But the enduring image of our bodies in and as art perpetuates our existence as significant.