With a renewed campaign to ban Page 3 models, topless women demanding equal rights on the streets of New York and controversy raging over paparazzi pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing semi nude – breasts are very much in the news.
Sam Pooley wants to photograph breasts – of all different shapes, ages and sizes – to create a montage work of art that will also be reproduced as a commercial designer wallpaper.
The images will be used in a subtle, tasteful form and will be shown at her degree show, at Birmingham University, next year, along with a soundtrack of women talking about their ‘natural assets’.
“Every woman has an opinion about their breasts. The majority I’ve spoken to don’t like theirs very much,” said 38-year-old Miss Pooley, of Castlefields, Shrewsbury.
“I wish to create an artwork that celebrates breasts and in the process enables women to feel liberated by the experience and have their self-confidence boosted.”
The fine art student, who runs popular children’s art classes and the art and craft gallery Compost and Gooseberry at Shrewsbury Market Hall, is also looking for a sponsor to help launch and showcase the wallpaper.
She said: “The breast has been a constant image used in art for many thousands of years, from Stone Age fertility goddesses and classical sculpture to breast-feeding Italian Renaissance Madonnas and fleshy modern nudes. It has been revered as life-giving, wholesome, liberating.
“In modern times photographic images of breasts have become something smutty or rude, while women in many African and South Pacific cultures wander around bare-chested all the time and no-one bats an eyelid.”
Miss Pooley, who will take the photographs herself at a private Shrewsbury town centre studio from November 8, already has 68 volunteers.
“The photographs will be taken sensitively and concentrate on the chest area. No faces will be used in the final artwork,” she added.
Volunteers are asked to contact Miss Pooley on 0753 182 4561 or email her at sam@ilovecompost.com.
Three years ago the fashionable Soho hotel restaurant Dean Street Townhouse became almost as talked about for its subtle intimate body part-themed wallpaper as its award-winning cuisine.
In September the actor and writer Lucy-Anne Holmes, took up where the former Labour MP Clare Short left off in the 1980s, to relaunch a national campaign to ban topless models from Page 3 of The Sun newspaper.
Last August bare-breasted women took to the streets of New York and other US towns, as part of a National-Go-Topless Day, to campaign for the same rights as men to go topless in public.
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