Fiber on the Edge
Returning to You’re Too Good Looking to Be This Size
I’m honored to have my piece You’re Too Good Looking to Be This Size included in Fiber on the Edge, curated by Susan Aaron-Taylor at the Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield.
The exhibition brings together artists who stretch fiber beyond conventional ideas of craft, using traditional techniques, alternative materials and mixed-media processes to explore what the medium can hold. The show is on view through September 2, 2026, with an artist talk on Sunday, August 30 at 2 p.m.
It is always interesting to revisit this piece as the years go on. Although the work itself remains unchanged, I do not. Each time it is exhibited, I meet it with a different body and a different understanding of what that body has carried.
I created You’re Too Good Looking to Be This Size in 2019 in response to something a doctor said while administering my annual physical. With his mouth close to my ear, he told me, “You’re too good looking to be this size.”
The piece is constructed from digital images printed on velvet and corduroy, then hand sewn with thread and cotton floss. At 55 by 66 inches, with a depth of 12 inches, it has a bodily presence of its own—soft, dimensional and impossible to separate from the physical experience that shaped it.
During that same appointment, the doctor also told me that I would be miserable if I became pregnant at my size. I was 24 years old. I was not trying to become pregnant, nor had I raised the subject of pregnancy or shared any family-planning goals with him. Still, my hypothetical future body was placed before me as a warning.
This time, I am reentering the work as someone living in a postpartum body.
And, well, joke’s on him.
I weighed more when I became pregnant than I did during that appointment, and I absolutely loved being pregnant. It will forever be the most beautiful I have ever felt and the most connected I have ever been to my body. I watched it stretch, shift and create space for my daughter. For once, change was not presented to me as failure. My body was not a problem to be corrected or a future catastrophe waiting to happen. It was powerful, intuitive and entirely its own.
That experience does not erase the complicated realities of body image, medical care or the postpartum body. If anything, it has given the piece another layer. I now return to it knowing how deeply another person’s careless words can settle into the body, and how completely lived experience can challenge the future someone else imagined for you.
You’re Too Good Looking to Be This Size began with a sentence that attempted to divide beauty from size. Years later, I understand the work less as a record of that doctor’s judgment and more as evidence of everything his words failed to predict: joy, transformation, motherhood and a relationship with my body that became more loving through change, not smaller because of it.
I am grateful for the opportunity to place this work into conversation with the artists of Fiber on the Edge and to encounter it again from this new place in my life.
Fiber on the Edge is on view through September 2, 2026, at the Janice Charach Gallery, located at 6600 West Maple Road in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Admission is free and open to the public.
