Society shapes and seeks to control behavior, relationships, and power. Saville, however, breaks down the social conventions that encourage women to fit into limiting beauty standards. Saville's subject, non-idealized bodies, have been understood as superposition of mental and emotional mindsets: "if we could see through our skins our psychological injuries, then the process will be clear: every injury and excess is hiding from the surface (in every successfully avoided blushing) it goes to our inner body (where it avoids to be noticed)" (Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo). Through the mediation of paint, Saville restores beauty and subjectivity to bodies that have been in what is seen as grotesque. In her own words: "A lot of women out there look and feel like that, made to fear their own excess, taken in by the cult of exercise, the great quest to be thin. The rhetoric used against obesity makes it sound far worse than alcohol or smoking, yet they can do you far more damage". It is acknowledged that Saville performs "explorations of people that are both intimate and uncomfortable. Through detailed, frank and unapologetic investigations of the human body, dialogues occur between past and present, and are animated by questions of gender, suffering, and ambiguity" (Asana Greenstreet).