Alison Lapper
Born without arms and put into care, she became the artist whose pregnant body stood in Trafalgar Square
Alison Lapper was born in Burton upon Trent in 1965 with phocomelia, a condition that left her with no arms and very short legs. She was taken from her mother within weeks and grew up at Chailey Heritage, a residential institution in Sussex for disabled children, where she was fitted with artificial limbs that she found heavy and useless and where, she has said, she was expected to be grateful and not to want much.
She left at seventeen, learned to drive an adapted car, and began to paint, holding the brush in her mouth. She joined the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists, which gave her an income, and in 1994 graduated from the University of Brighton with a first-class degree in fine art. Her work is mostly about her own body: photographs and paintings that treat it as a fact to be looked at, not hidden or pitied.
In 2000 she gave birth to a son, Parys. The sculptor Marc Quinn carved her in white marble at eight months pregnant, and in 2005 the statue was placed on the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, where it stayed for two years. Some found it uncomfortable; she said that was rather the point. A giant inflatable version rose over the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics in 2012. She was appointed MBE in 2003.
Parys died in 2019, aged nineteen, after struggles with drugs and mental illness. She has spoken publicly about his death and continues to paint and to work on television.