Mariken WesselsQueen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off

Queen Ann P.S. Belly cut off is the unfolding of a melancholic narrative of a woman whose life seems to be dominated by her obesity. Wessels affords her readers a gaze that is at once intimate but never voyeuristic. Queen Ann's peculiar and touching photo collages function as self-renderings that express a longing for another 'being'; these projections of herself coalesce with the image that the book evokes around her persona. An uncomfortable incompatibility emerges between the present and the past life of Ann and the status of being beautiful, an unease that the arrangement of the photos make all too evident.