Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (2024)

When Alison Lapper modelled for the artist Marc Quinn for a nude sculpture in 2000, she knew it would raise eyebrows. Lapper, an artist who was pregnant at the time, was born without arms and with shortened legs. But even she wasn’t ready for the uproar when the sculpture, rendered in white marble, was unveiled on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square five years later.

“People were writing to the papers saying, ‘People like that having babies? It’s disgusting. We shouldn’t have to pay for it’,” she recalls. “Listen, nobody paid for my son but me. They said it was disrespectful to Nelson. Well, he lost an arm!”

After Lapper gave birth, Quinn created a second sculpture of her with her baby, Parys, sitting in her lap. “He looks like the Christ child, which is hilarious given how people think it must have been an immaculate conception. Because everyone knows disabled people don’t have sex.”

The sculptures, she continues, are “a piece of history. I’m no longer a 34-year-old pregnant woman and Parys is now dead. I love how beautiful they are. But they also break my heart because that’s my little boy and he’s not here.”

Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (1)

When I meet Lapper, 59, over video call, she is in her publicist’s office at the BBC in London; home, for her, is Worthing on the Sussex coast. We are here to talk about the new documentary In My Own Words: Alison Lapper, which charts her life and shows her preparing for a new exhibition, Lost in Parys, in which she confronts her grief for her son who died at 19 after a drug overdose. The show includes the Quinn sculptures, on loan from the artist.

It’s not the first time Lapper has appeared on film. Many will know her from Child of Our Time, the BBC docuseries following the fortunes of 25 babies born in 2000, in which the nation watched her give birth by caesarean section and change Parys’s nappies with her teeth.

Why the compulsion to have her life documented? “I think I’ve always had this streak where I need to prove that I can do this, to stand on a par with everybody else,” she reflects. “When you’re disabled, people don’t believe you can do things: that you can drive, work, pay your own mortgage. It’s probably my biggest driving force, to prove the doubters wrong.”

In person, as on film, Lapper is excellent company: warm, funny and bracingly blunt. She has endured unthinkable heartache and trauma, experiences that feed into her work and her conversation. Grief is a big topic for her.

Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (2)

“There are a lot of people who don’t understand it. They don’t know what to say. So they’ll go: ‘Oh, you’re looking well’, as if that means I must be over [Parys’s death]. Well, it’s true that I’m still working. I’ve got bills to pay. But there is a great big hole where my son was, and it makes me feel incredibly sad and sometimes hopeless. It’s been five years and there are some days when I don’t want to be here. You’re not meant to say that but it’s how I feel because I should have been first, not him. He should have outlived me.”

When Parys died, he was living in a hotel in Worthing. He had suffered from mental illness from his mid-teens when he was bullied at school about his mum’s disabilities and began smoking cannabis. Matters came to a head when he was 16 and Lapper asked for him to be sectioned. He spent the last few years of his life on a grim merry-go-round of mental health units, hotels and hostels. Often Lapper couldn’t visit him because the building in which he was housed wasn’t wheelchair accessible.

For three years after Parys died, she couldn’t paint. Instead, “I had a major breakdown and my mental health really suffered”. When she finally picked up a paintbrush, “it just poured out of me. When Parys was alive, I told him I couldn’t paint him because he was too beautiful. There was no way I could capture him. Now his face keeps appearing in my work.”

Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (3)

It’s there in the haunting portrait “Bleeding Out”, which depicts Parys in close-up, blood streaming from his eyes and nose, and in “Nothing Left To Give – Parys Looking Down”, where he appears simultaneously angelic and agonised. “A Mother’s Anguish” is a self-portrait by Lapper even though you wouldn’t know it was her. A screaming face bathed in red, it is grief distilled.

Lapper paints using her mouth, a practice that dates back centuries. “I’m the reincarnation of Sarah Biffin,” she says proudly, referring to the portrait artist born in 1784 without arms and legs who was also a mouth painter. “She was in the circus but later was able to buy her own house. Like me, she was very independent and determined and decided, ‘I’m not going to be this exhibit. I’m going to be an artist in my own right’.”

As well as reflecting on Parys’s life and death, In My Own Words also finds Lapper reliving moments from her childhood. A “love child” born in 1965, she wasn’t expected to live. “[My mother] was told that I was ugly and disgusting and would die soon, so she ought to christen me [before that happened],” she says. “She was going to call me a pretty name but then she saw me and decided to call me Alison, a name she plucked from the air.”

At six weeks old, Lapper was put into a home for children with complex disabilities near Lewes, Sussex, where it was policy for staff not to hug their charges and where her mother didn’t visit her until she was four. Where most people have family photos of themselves as children, Lapper has medical photographs, in which she models assorted braces and mechanical limbs. “They thought we needed arms and legs, to be like everybody else. And, of course, you don’t because your body learns to compensate.”

Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (4)

From the age of three, painting was Lapper’s “safe place. When I was drawing, I was lost in it. I was being left alone to do what I wanted to do.” At 16, she won an art competition, which led to her being contacted by the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists association, who gave her a monthly stipend that covered basic living expenses. “And I never looked back because I knew that if I could secure that livelihood, I could survive by myself,” Lapper says. “I wouldn’t need to be on loads of benefits and be another disabled person out of work.”

In her mid-twenties, Lapper began studying for a degree in Fine Art at Brighton University where, along with painting, she experimented with photography and sculpture, making nude plaster casts and self-portraits inspired by ancient Greek sculptures such as the Venus de Milo. When one of her tutors told her she had “nice tits”, she was thrilled. “I never got to walk down the street and get wolf whistled. I know women find it offensive, and I understand that. But as a disabled person you’re not seen as sexy or beautiful, so when he said that I just thought, ‘Wahey!’”

Read Next

Arts

Francis Bacon: Human Presence is explicit and exhilarating

Read More

Lapper says she spent years trying to make her mother proud. “You never stop trying because you think one day you’re going to do something amazing and they’ll say something kind.” The film contains an archive recording of her mother – who died in 2022 – saying she couldn’t love her daughter. “So all that time I tried to get her to love me, that was just a waste of time,” Lapper says, rolling her eyes.

When I tell her how well-adjusted she seems, given such emotional deprivation, she laughs and replies: “That’s debatable! It messes with your head, for sure. You have to learn that it isn’t you, that’s just her opinion. My friends and the people I’m close to don’t treat me like that.”

Lapper says she tries to keep looking forward, even though Parys is on her mind every day. “I’ve got to learn to live without making memories with him, and it’s hard. If someone said to me, ‘You can be able-bodied or you can have Parys back’, there would be no contest. I’d have my boy back in an instant.”

In My Own Words: Alison Lapper is on tonight at 10.40pm on BBC One. Alison Lapper: Lost in Parys is at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery until 29 September (wtm.uk/events/lost-in-parys)

Alison Lapper: 'I couldn't paint my son when he was alive - he was too beautiful' (2024)

References

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Neely Ledner

Last Updated:

Views: 6071

Rating: 4.1 / 5 (62 voted)

Reviews: 85% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Neely Ledner

Birthday: 1998-06-09

Address: 443 Barrows Terrace, New Jodyberg, CO 57462-5329

Phone: +2433516856029

Job: Central Legal Facilitator

Hobby: Backpacking, Jogging, Magic, Driving, Macrame, Embroidery, Foraging

Introduction: My name is Neely Ledner, I am a bright, determined, beautiful, adventurous, adventurous, spotless, calm person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.