Major Project
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“Redefine Your Shape”: Stitching Identity into Fashion
Returning from China, I felt newly energised to push the boundaries of my major project further—both conceptually and materially. One of the first pieces I created upon returning was a printed shirt featuring a self-designed, ad-style graphic with the words “Redefine Your Shape.” This powerful statement lies at the heart of my project: it challenges the dominant messaging within fashion advertising and encourages individuals—particularly women—to reclaim agency over their own body image, outside of commercialised or homogenised ideals.
“Redefine Your Shape”: Stitching Identity into Fashion
The language of fashion ads is often used to sell conformity. My use of that visual language—repurposed with a radically different message—is an act of subversion. The phrase “Redefine Your Shape” becomes a call to action, an invitation to question who defines beauty and why, and a reminder that shape, size, and form are personal, evolving, and political.
Around the shirt, I’ve sewn fragments of my digitally printed fabrics, each one featuring paintings of women’s bodies in varying sizes, colours, and postures. These aren’t abstract decorations—they are visual testimonies. Each painted body contributes to a wider narrative that resists narrow body standards and celebrates plurality. By sewing them onto the shirt, I create a tapestry-like piece that surrounds and supports the central slogan. The act of stitching—laborious, slow, and intimate—contrasts with the mass-produced speed of fast fashion, further underlining my rejection of fashion’s exploitative norms.
“Redefine Your Shape”: Stitching Identity into Fashion
This work marks a shift in form: while previous pieces were wearable garments, this shirt-tapestry hybrid functions more like an artefact or banner—blurring the lines between fashion, protest art, and textile installation. It invites viewers to reflect, not consume. It asks them to see the body not as a site of judgment, but as a canvas of meaning.
Importantly, this piece ties back to my original mission: to critique fashion advertising and reclaim the gaze. In a world saturated with edited images and unattainable standards, “Redefine Your Shape” is not just a statement—it's an intervention. It reminds us that fashion, when used critically, can be a radical space for self-definition, storytelling, and change.
Visualising the Internal: Drawing the Psychological Weight of Body Image
As part of my ongoing exploration into how women navigate body image in a fashion-dominated culture, I’ve returned to painting and drawing—a foundational part of my creative practice. These works are not passive illustrations of the body; they are emotional mappings. Each piece I’ve created is grounded in an urgent need to represent the lived, often unspoken, psychological complexities that women experience in relation to their physical form.
Tracing the Female Form
In these paintings and drawings, I’ve intentionally focused on raw, unidealised depictions of the female body—stretch marks, curves, softness, vulnerability. They serve as visual counter-narratives to the glossy, airbrushed imagery that dominates fashion advertising. The choice of colour, mark-making, and gestural line speaks to emotion and sensation rather than perfection. There’s a deliberate roughness to the figures—some appear weightless, others weighted down, evoking the spectrum of feelings women carry: shame, pride, anxiety, strength, disconnection, and reclamation.
Visualising the Internal: Drawing the Psychological Weight of Body Image
By exhibiting these paintings alongside my printed garments and textile-based works, I’m emphasizing the psychological roots of this project. While fabric, clothing, and wearable art exist in the physical world, these images represent the mental spaces women often inhabit when faced with societal beauty standards. They remind the viewer that the body image crisis is not just skin-deep—it’s internal, layered, and ongoing.
These artworks also serve as a quiet protest. There is no spectacle or seduction here—only honesty. In allowing these bodies to exist without performance, I challenge the viewer to confront the real consequences of media-driven ideals, and to sit with the discomfort that comes from witnessing unfiltered embodiment.
Ultimately, these drawings and paintings are vital to the project because they provide a visual language for something difficult to articulate: the emotional labour of being seen, judged, or unseen at all. They act as both testimony and resistance—and in doing so, they strengthen the project's goal of redefining the gaze through authenticity, vulnerability, and care.
Building Beyond the Canvas: Turning Visual Work into Real-World Impact
These drawings and paintings hold the emotional backbone of my project, and I see them as more than just artistic outputs—they are tools for advocacy and change. Moving forward, I aim to use this body of work as a foundation to support the written manifesto I’m developing, visually reinforcing its call to challenge body ideals and reclaim self-definition. Beyond the academic context, this collection could evolve into the core of a wider initiative—potentially forming the basis of a platform or foundation dedicated to body image education, creative healing, and representation in fashion. Exhibiting these works in public spaces or community workshops could open conversations around body image and mental health, using art to create space for dialogue, empowerment, and redefinition.