Leah Worley (b. 2005, Los Angeles) is a New York City-based visual artist currently pursuing a Fine Arts degree at Parsons School of Design. 

 

My current work is centered around my experiences growing up within Christian and Catholic traditions, and specifically how religion can shape the way we understand our bodies and ourselves. I am interested in the tension between aspects of religion that are supposed to feel comforting or sacred and the ways they can also create feelings of restriction, guilt, shame, or alienation. Much of my work looks at ideas of devotion, purity, modesty, femininity, sexuality, and bodily autonomy.

 

I use realistic oil painting to explore these ideas because oil painting has such a strong historical connection to religious imagery and traditional forms of representation. Using this medium is a way of questioning what we consider sacred.

 

Rather than simply rejecting or accepting religion, I am interested in examining the relationship between faith and the body. I want to explore ways religion has shaped ideas about women, femininity, and the female body. My work considers expectations surrounding purity, modesty, sexuality, motherhood, and what a woman's body is expected to represent. I want to explore how these expectations can be both external and internal and how they can affect the way women view themselves and their own bodies.