Bodies That Don’t Apologize

As a kid I made my own magazines. Mostly terrible—stapled printouts about whatever obsession had claimed me that week, abandoned the moment the next one arrived. But the making of them felt like something real, like claiming a channel that was genuinely yours. You had a thing to say and now you had a vehicle for it, however badly designed.

Sho Haze is a Birmingham-based artist who never stopped. She draws, she illustrates, and she produces her own magazines—small-run publications sold to a curated audience, the kind of object that has actual weight in your hands. Her preferred subject is the female figure: naked, full-breasted, dropped into vivid landscapes that blur the line between the celebratory and the macabre. Big bodies in a colorful world, and somewhere beneath all that color, death. The tension between those two things is what keeps the work from being merely decorative.

She photographed with James Beddoes for Sticks & Stones, stepping in front of the lens herself—inhabiting the same nakedness she gives her drawn figures, which is either a natural extension of the work or a pointed statement about it, probably both. I feel I have a pretty distinct look, she said about herself. Accurate. Also an understatement. The feminist politics run through all of it not as theory but as visual fact: these bodies exist, they take up space, and they’re not waiting for anyone’s approval to do either.