‘The world was against us’ - artist Alison Lapper on the son she lost

The director of a contemporary art gallery once said: “If you’ve got an Alison Lapper up on the wall, you’ve got to justify it every day.”

All her life, artist Alison Lapper has faced constant scrutiny about her artwork and personal life.

Born with a condition called phocomelia, meaning she has no arms and shortened legs, Alison sparked debate when she posed, naked and pregnant, for a sculpture. The artwork sat on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square for two years from 2005.

As she reflects on being shown videos and photographs from across her life for a new BBC One documentary, Alison has opened up about the grief of losing her son, Parys, and the love she never received from her own mother, who had been told she had given birth to a “monster”.

Parys died in 2019 of an accidental drug overdose, aged 19.

“The world was against us, and I very much felt that right from the beginning,” says Alison, who was expecting Parys when she posed for the Trafalgar Square sculpture. She remains defiant about the artwork’s legacy.

Some people reacted at the time calling the 11.5ft (3.5m) sculpture by Marc Quinn “vulgar” and “‘disgusting”, she says, and that “she shouldn’t be naked and pregnant and disabled and a single parent”.

“It’s just like, mind your business,” she tells the BBC.

Among the lifeless statues of men who had conquered the past, sat a living figure of a pregnant, disabled woman looking to the future - a future where differences were celebrated.

“Someone said, ‘What would Nelson think?’” says Alison. The naval hero’s statue towers above the square.

“Who cares what Nelson thinks,” she says. “He’s dead.”

Some of the footage Alison watched for the documentary brought back joyous memories - such as her time studying for a fine art degree at Brighton University in the 1990s.

There, she began to examine the beauty of her body and pose for photographs in the classical style of the Venus de Milo. She recalls being thrilled one day to receive a compliment from one male tutor that she had “nice tits”, as nobody had ever told her that before.