For most people, Barbie is a toy. For Marika Callangan, Barbie is a battleground.
The Metro Manila-based artist, who works under the moniker Woman Create, has spent years collecting Barbie dolls, boxes, catalogs, and magazines—the glossy fragments of a global icon that has shaped ideas of beauty, desire, and womanhood for generations.
But instead of preserving these images, she cuts them apart.
Faces are multiplied. Bodies are fragmented. Limbs become patterns. Layers of embroidery, beadwork, textiles, and collage intervene until the familiar blonde fantasy becomes something else entirely.
Something more complicated. More human.
Callangan’s work is rooted in what she described as “playful interrogations and intimate obsessions with femininity.” Through her vibrant femmages, she dissects the visual language that has long defined how women are expected to look, behave, and occupy space.
These explorations, she said, are rooted in personal experiences and visual culture, using “sexualized form” to challenge dominant ideas about femininity and society’s perception of women and their bodies.
There is a quiet irony in her choice of material. Barbie was created as an ideal—a carefully manufactured vision of womanhood exported around the world. Yet in Callangan’s hands, the doll becomes a tool for dismantling ideals rather than reinforcing them.
The artist has been collecting Barbie-related ephemera since childhood, keeping the packaging and printed materials long after the dolls themselves had served their purpose. Years later, those discarded remnants became the foundation of an artistic practice centered on reclamation.
Through collage, she performs a kind of visual excavation, uncovering the assumptions hidden beneath familiar images. What emerges are works that feel simultaneously playful and confrontational, inviting viewers to reconsider what femininity looks like when women are allowed to define it themselves.
Her newer pieces push this inquiry even further. By incorporating embroidery, beadwork, appliqué, and textiles—forms traditionally associated with women’s labor and domestic craft—Callangan elevates mediums that have often been excluded from conversations about “serious” art.
The embellishments are not decorative afterthoughts. They are part of the argument.
By “feminizing visual forms from the immense to the most intimate,” Callangan said she seeks to challenge gendered power structures while opening spaces for dialogue, reimagination, and reclamation.
The artist’s growing body of work has steadily gained recognition within the Philippine contemporary art scene. Currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines, Callangan held her first solo exhibition at ANIMA Art Space in 2023 and has since participated in major exhibitions and art events including Art Fair Philippines 2026, Art in the Park, 98B Collaboratory, Parola Gallery, Cartellino Gallery, Improv Art Gallery, and Everything’s Fine PH.
In 2024, she expanded her practice internationally as an exhibitor at the Taipei Art Book Fair, marking her first participation in a global art convention.
Beyond gallery walls, her visual language has found audiences through collaborations with brands and institutions such as H&M Philippines, Bonifacio Art Foundation, Inc., MONKI, dm-drogerie markt Germany, Booth & Partners, Shake Shake PH, and even the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority. She also designed the cover of feminist writer Lilia Quindoza Santiago’s book Kritika Feminista.
As a member of the TLYR Collective and Manila Collage Collective, Callangan belongs to a new generation of Filipino artists expanding the possibilities of collage while centering women’s experiences within contemporary art.
What makes her work compelling is that it does not offer easy answers. It neither fully rejects femininity nor blindly celebrates it. Instead, it treats femininity as something fluid, layered, contradictory, and constantly negotiated.
Like collage itself.
Every cut removes something. Every addition creates a new possibility.
In Marika Callangan’s world, femininity is not a finished image printed on a toy box.
It is something continuously being torn apart, stitched back together, and reimagined.
