Biography

As a child growing up in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada, Courtney Tessier learned about art in two dimensions: drawing and painting. Art school in Montreal opened her aperture to other mediums: sculpture, pottery and most importantly photography.

A digital camera prompted her to take self-portraits long before the term selfie entered our vocabularies. Despite gallery representation as a painter, the art world wasn’t fulfilling her artistic passion or paying rent. A multifaceted career in retail, business and other endeavors took her away from her original calling. Nevertheless, she continued to take pictures, briefly joined the Suicide Girls site online and flirted with life as a Bettie Page-inspired pinup.

In the late aughts, she began posting her own work on the then-nascent social media platform Tumblr and found a community of likeminded “modelographers,” such as Katie West, Jacs Fishburne and others. Under the nom de plume Faye Daniels, Courtney shared images of her fleshy, colorfully tattooed body presenting radiance and confidence before body positivity became a hashtag. Subsequently, she collaborated on Babefest, a folio of female-centric (primarily) nude photography with its third volume published in 2018.

Life events intervened, distracted and detoured her, yet self-portraits recorded her evolution, her emotions, her inner feelings through outward exposure.

What started as snapshots in time evolved into a larger, more complex and ultimately meaningful form of visual art. Courtney learned to use light — always natural — and not succumb to the deceptive power of Photoshop. Her work evolved, while retaining the emotional honesty at its core.

Courtney’s current work takes a more narrative, cinematic form. Through her photographs, she tells stories: traveling to Hawaii following a horrific rape resulting in an abortion and returning to her hometown following that traumatic life event. Other works embrace more ordinary but no less important subjects of body acceptance and self-discovery.

Courtney’s self-portraiture exudes a feminine power defying both fat fetishes and body shamers alike — revealing a genuine, confrontational yet rewarding message of strength and self-assuredness. 

Courtney’s work is all about her yet the stories she tells and thoughts she provokes through her visual art radiate more universal themes.