CHARLI CREATIVE

WARRIOR WOMAN

This series began with my body — how it has been judged, reshaped, and spoken of for as long as I can remember. I was eight when I was put on my first diet by a school nurse. At sixteen, I weighed sixteen stone. Since then, the body I live in has been treated as a problem to fix, to silence, to shrink. The deliberately up-close images invite viewers to sit with discomfort: to witness the grotesque, the performative, the beautiful, and the broken, all within the same frame. I learned early to view myself from the outside, to edit before anyone else could. But now I question those distortions. In another time, would my androgen levels, high insulin and volatile hormones, have been a gift for survival? Perhaps I was a warrior in a previous life. Perhaps my body was never broken. Perhaps it was my chariot.

Each image is a negotiation between pain and power. In Dysmorphia, My Most Deadly Diets and Spilt Milk I examine the gap between how I feel and want to appear, and the quiet violence of living in that space. These photographs are not about self-love or self-hate. They are about visualising a feeling, experiencing without shame. Is it possible to rest, without decay?

Through symbolic self-portraiture, I reclaim visibility — sometimes fragmented, sometimes defiant, sometimes tender. Images like Mounjaro Gains, 5 O’clock Shadow and Warrior Woman confront the binaries I’ve been held against: masculine/feminine, strong/soft, seen/erased, natural/unnatural. I offer something messier and honest in their place.

In Tied, the image of my body entangled with my daughter, mirrors the restrictions I internalised as a young person. Now, as a mother, I carry the fear of passing those patterns on to her. This image is a reckoning with that fear, an attempt to loosen the knots.

This project is a layered reflection on what we’re willing to sacrifice for acceptance, admiration, or autonomy. It opens space for empathy and confrontation, challenging the ways we see our bodies and the bodies of others.