Chariot is an ongoing photographic project exploring how diet culture and beauty ideals from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries continue to shape contemporary relationships to the body.

I grew up during a period when calorie counting, tabloid body-shaming and public weigh-ins were normalised. At eight years old, I was placed on my first diet by a school nurse. By adolescence, my body had already become something to be monitored and measured against public ideals. Now, as a mother to a daughter growing up within a digital image economy, I find myself questioning what might be inherited—and what I might pass on.

Through staged self-portraiture and constructed still life, the work reflects on how bodies are shaped within wider cultural and visual environments. Images are repeatedly printed and re-photographed, introducing material degradation that mirrors the circulation and distortion of contemporary image culture.

As the project develops, collaborative image-making will introduce multiple voices and lived experiences, exploring how these narratives are carried across generations.