The Obesity Unit: the corporeal quality of 'bigness' that is central to diagnosis of obesity is mirrored in the ways in which we concieve of the 'obesity problem' in society, and the scale of the means required to address it.

Cartoon reproduced with permission from the artist, J Banx.

In Happy Eaters (top) and Deep Freeze and TV Dinner (catwalk shot, below), the artist investigates obesogenic environments.

Artist Tim Head is represented by works in the collections of the British Museum, Gulbenkian Foundation, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York. Images are reproduced with permission from the artist.

Antony Gormley's work is concerned with the body as a place of memory and transformation, and a vehicle for the exploration of self and other in space. His public sculptures have inspired lively discussion and debate about the everyday, individual body.

Top: Prior to the opening of Gormley's first major show at London's Hayward Gallery in 2007, 31 life-sized sculptures of Gormley's body appeared in public spaces surrounding the gallery. They were all turned to face the gallery.

Middle: In the summer of 2009, Gormley created a living monument on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. In the space that is normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals, Gormley installed randomly-selected volunteers from around the UK every hour of every day, for 100 days. Entitled One and Other, the work was intended to represent the whole of humanity, challenging the way we celebrate the individual. Gormley comments: "Through elevation onto the plinth, and removal from the common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol. In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society. It could be tragic but it could also be funny."

Below: Another Time was installed on the roof of Exeter College, Oxford, on February 15, 2009. Positioned overlooking the junction of Broad and Turl Streets, the scupture looks toward the site where Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer were burned at the stake for their beliefs in the 16th century.

Images courtesy of S Ulijaszek.

Nayland Blake engaged with issues of over-eating in his 1998 piece Gorge. Nayland Blake has works in the perrmanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He is represented by the Matthew Marks gallery, New York.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Andrew Carnie studied chemistry and painting at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina, then zoology and psychology at Durham University, before gaining a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

His current practice concerns various scientific topics, primarily in the form of time-based installations. For ‘Head On', a show on neurology at the Science Museum (in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust) Carnie produced a number of pieces of work centered around memory, the brain, and neuroscience, while working with neuroscientists at the Medical Research Center for Developmental Neurology, Kings College, London. In July 2002, Carnie presented ‘Disperse', a new work produced for 'Hygiene - the art of public health' at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London. The work explores ideas around 'removal' and thoughts about the departure of the human body at death, looking at processes by which the body might be physically ‘dispersed'; be rendered back to atomic particles.

The featured images are from slice (slide dissolve work), which features 162 slides on a journey through the body. This work was inspired by conversations with neuropsychologist and writer Paul Broks.

Images courtesy of the artist.

Jenny Saville's daring paintings are known for the mountains of flesh they reveal and strong feminist undertones.

Jenny Saville's work is described on artbank.com as a 'dark reflection of contemporary fashion, depicting bodies that live outside the standard boundaries of attractiveness. Her feminist view of the female body shapes offers a valuable contrast to the mass media’s presentation of the perfectibility of the human form'.

Images courtesy of the artist.