Alison Lapper

• Name — Alison Lapper • Honorific Suffix — MBE • Born — 7 April 1965 • Birthplace — Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire • Education — Chailey Heritage School Queen Elizabeth's Foundation for Disabled People • Alma Mater — Heatherley School of Fine Art University of Brighton School of Art • Children — Parys Lapper

Alison Lapper was born on 7 April 1965 in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. She was born without arms and with shortened legs, a condition called phocomelia. She was institutionalized in her infancy, and is still distant from her relatives. When she was fitted with artificial limbs, she felt that the aim was not to help her, but to make her look less disconcerting to others. She abandoned them, finding life far easier without external aids. She left Chailey Heritage School, Sussex, at the age of 17, and moved to London. She then attended the Queen Elizabeth's Foundation for Disabled People, in Banstead, Surrey until the age of 19, where she learned to drive. She completed both 'O' and 'A'-levels in art at Sutton College of Learning for Adults, before pre-foundation and foundation courses at Heatherley School of Fine Art. Lapper then moved to Brighton and studied in the Faculty of Art and Architecture at the University of Brighton, graduating with a first class honours degree in Fine Art in 1994.

Lapper uses photography, digital imaging, and painting to, as she says, question physical normality and beauty, using herself as a subject. She is a member of the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World (AMFPA), having joined as a student member and receiving a full membership after her college graduation. The AMFPA required their artists to create Christmas cards to earn funding, so Lapper began her career making scenic, realistic landscape paintings. During her early college years many of her portraits depicted subjects that adhere to Western beauty standards. Over the course of her education she shifted her focus to portraying and exploring her own body as her subject instead. One particular influence is the sculpture Venus de Milo, due to the physical similarities between the idealised classical female statue and Lapper's own body. She has taken part in various British exhibitions, including in the Royal Festival Hall. In May 2003, Lapper was awarded an MBE for her services for art. After she had given birth to her son Parys in 2000, she created an installation of photographs of herself with him. Lapper and her son featured on the BBC television documentary Child of Our Time. In 2006, she published her book My Life in My Hands. After the death of her son, Parys, she worked in an exhibition called Lost in Parys where she painted various portraits of him. She also invited artists Marc Quinn and Rankin to contribute to the conversation.

Lapper had a son, Parys, with whom she was pregnant when posing for the Marc Quinn sculpture. He died suddenly from a suspected accidental drug overdose in August 2019, aged 19. His mother afterwards said that he had been bullied at school over her disability, which led to him being sectioned for mental health problems at the age of 17. Her grief led her to help create The Drug of Art, a charity which encourages young people to create art with the goal of combatting mental health issues for youth.

In 2006 Alison Lapper wrote My Life in My Hands, an autobiography chronicling her entire life story from her birth up until when Alison Lapper: Pregnant was erected. London Vénus: Une vie d'Alison Lapper, an unauthorised biography of Lapper in comic-book form, was published in France in 2022. It is written by Yaneck Chareyre and drawn by Mathieu Bertrand, and tells Lapper's story from her birth to the funeral of Parys Lapper.

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