Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
CHARLIE FITZ
Location
Devon
Website
Social Media
Medium
Digital collage
Note on medium:
Four of the artworks included are what I term ‘assisted-self portraits’.
I developed this method of collaborative portraiture with my partner in art and life, Oscar Vinter. I have used the term to describe both collaborative photoshoots and artworks using archival photography. Both photographer and subject must consent to the artwork, but the most essential part of the work is that the final work belongs to the subject and they have autonomy over their representation, as I developed this mode of working at a time when I felt I had little control over my life and representation, particularly in medical spaces. In these specific assisted-self portraits I have repurposed archival portraits taken of me by Oscar Vinter with his permission into digital collages. This mode of portraiture requires a pre-existing relationship between the subject and photographer in which there is trust, respect and good communication. The mode aims to acknowledge human vulnerability and celebrate relationships of care and interdependence. I view the collaborative artworks Vinter and I create as extensions of our interdependent, care centred partnership.
Titles
As digital, these works can be printed on a range of materials and in a variety of sizes.
Title: Remote (2022)
Medium: Digital collage & assisted-self portrait
Credits: Charlie Fitz with photography by Oscar Vinter
Title: Hostile Environment (2022)
Medium: Digital collage & assisted-self portrait
Credits: Charlie Fitz with photography by Oscar Vinter
Title: Shielder (2022)
Medium: Digital collage & assisted-self portrait
Credits: Charlie Fitz with photography by Oscar Vinter
Title: Making Space For Trauma (2020)
Medium: Digital collage & assisted-self portrait
Credits: Charlie Fitz with photography by Oscar Vinter.
Title: Mr Surgeon (2020)
Medium: Digital drawing and collage
Bio
Charlie Fitz (she/her/they) is a South Devon based self taught artist. She studied English and Drama at Goldsmiths and is currently a medical humanities postgraduate at Birkbeck. She is a founding member of Resting Up Collective and a co-director of the remote artist studio TRIAD³. Her work expresses and explores her individual but nuanced experience of crip existence, whilst interrogating the historic power dynamics at play. Exploring both the close up, personal and sensory moments of existing in a sick “bodymind” and the wider, cultural and political experience of existing as a disabled woman in contemporary society.
Heterotopias are worlds within our world, in which the inhabitants are cut off from society, breaking with its rules. Chronic Heterotopia is a triptych of crip post-apocalyptic assisted-self portraits. Utilising collage to re-contextualise portraits taken of me in hospital, into imagined landscapes. The series explores the concept of heterotopias in relation to illness, time and convalescence, exploring the profound existential changes that occur when you get sick and never get better. I have paired the triptych with two earlier works inwhich I began using digital collage, assisted-self portraits and imagined worlds to make space for my medical trauma.
