Charmaine Watkiss had over 20 years of experience working in digital design before becoming an artist. Working primarily in the mediums of drawing and printmaking, her career has included several successful shows, accolades, and international residences. We caught up with Charmaine, ahead of a group show entitled ‘ Me, Myself and I’ at the Collyer Bristow Gallery in London.
Thank you for granting the interview. Congratulations on your forthcoming show, entitled ‘Me, Myself and I’. What is the thinking behind the title?
The group show is the brainchild of Collyer Bristow Gallery’s curator Rosalind Davis. She wanted to put together a show which investigates artists’ self-inquiry and expressions of the interior self. The exhibition will span across painting, drawing photography and assemblage.
We’re looking forward to seeing the show. Is it entirely new work?
I will have two works in the show, both of them were completed during my first year of MA Drawing, which was at Wimbledon College of art. I attended the course 2016-2018
You were originally a footwear designer, creating hand made ’couture’ shoes to order. How did you become a practicing visual artist?
Becoming an artist has been a long process, this is my third career! Yes, I made women’s couture shoes – I had attended Cordwainers College at a time when not many people knew about it. I was committed to making men’s shoes until I became the joint winner in a design competition by the Queen’s shoemakers (H&M Rayne, who are no longer around) I worked there as part of my prize and designed a collection for them which did well. I set up my studio after I graduated, but it was tough – in the late ’80s black creatives faced a huge amount of discrimination, it was tough to get my work manufactured when I did get large orders so my business folded.
I decided to study film because of my experience, I felt a need to tell our stories (as black people) to counter a lot of negative perceptions about us. I graduated from the University of Westminster in 1994 and had a very brief involvement in the film world but the mid-’90s was a pretty bad time for the British Film industry. I went to a trade show and met someone who was a visiting tutor on my course. He was involved in multimedia and had just been given the position of Head of Multimedia at Iniva (the institute of international visual arts). He asked if I would be interested in helping visual artists make online works. I wasn’t interested because it sounded too techie and I wanted to make film. But by the time I got home from the meeting I changed my mind because I had been out of work for 9 months!
I ended up working with artists who were commissioned to make digital works – Iniva was way ahead of the curve because this was back in 1996. We made shockwave animated movies and multimedia presentations. Then, when Iniva co-curated the Rhapsodies in Black exhibition (about the Harlem Renaissance), which opened at the Hayward Gallery I was asked to create the website – so I learned how to do that on the job.
The exhibition opened in 1997, my time at Iniva finished – I had lost my mum at this time so I applied for a permanent digital job within a publishing company. All of this was meant to be until I got myself together – I ended up being a digital designer for 22 years!! Anyway, about 2014 I was REALLY fed up of what I was doing career-wise, I was working in advertising and had lost a sense of who I was as a creative – the industry can be pretty brutal, and after all this time there are still hardly any black creatives, that’s another story…
So, as luck would have it I did a short course at City Lit, I felt I needed to ask the person who led the course if he gives personal tutorials. He said yes, and a couple of weeks after the course finished I was at his studio – he went through my work (because I had started printmaking and creating artists’ books since 2008). He thought my work was great but said I approached my making as a designer and not an artist, so advised me to do the City Lit Art and Design foundation, just as a way of reconnecting to who I was as a creative. So that is what I did, and it was one of the best things I have done. The course is pretty rigorous, and I think it is one of the few foundation courses that still teach students.
So I completed the course in 2015 and was accepted straight onto the MA Drawing program at Wimbledon. I deferred for a year, started in 2016 and completed in 2018.
I made the decision this year, January 2020 to go full time as an artist, spurred by the fact that I was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize last year, which started to open up opportunities for me, so I decided to take the plunge – If I don’t do it now I never will!
Your inspiration for producing work stems from what you’ve described as ‘memory stories’. Can you elaborate on your research and development process?
I am inspired to tell ‘our stories’, I guess I had unfinished business from my film making days! My first ‘memory story’ was created on my foundation course. Lost/Found came out of me asking about a street name close to where I live in Bermondsey called Jamaica Road. I always wondered why it was called that, so I did research in the local history library, the Museum of London in Docklands as well as online research and discovered that Southwark Council had strong connections to the transatlantic slave trade. I had done enough research to make a documentary, so I was pretty overwhelmed with the information. My family are from Jamaica, I could see connections with some of my family history, so someone in my crit group suggested a self-portrait. It kind of made sense, so I set about making a life-sized figure only because I wanted to challenge myself. So that process gave birth to my current working methods.
What I make, however, are not self-portraits. I get an idea for something that I want to research. I then initially do online research, I will then visit libraries and archives and then extract what story I want to tell. I tend to connect to a personal emotion as a way of giving life to the characters that I draw. I am interested in telling stories about the diaspora, talking about how we have made contributions to British life and culture, I am also interested in ancestral lineage and stories of the cosmos. I like tracing all of these things back to African origins. Ultimately my stories tend to be multi-layered narratives and can be read in many different ways. Once the work is done I am always interested in how other people read the work.
One of your many notable pieces is ‘ They Didn’t Come to Stay’ What inspired this particular work?
They Didn’t Come to Stay was completed in 2017, while I was in the first year of my MA. At that time I didn’t feel enough was being said about my parent’s generation who came here in the ’60s to help rebuild post-war Britain. I found my mum’s old passport from 1962, I was struck by the line which says:
“to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary”
This was not their experience when they came here, so I wanted to include stories my mother told me about her first impressions of Britain when she came here, I also wanted to include memories of my generation who were born here and were rebelling against the system which was stacked against us. I decided to use the ‘3 graces’ trope as a way of describing 3 distinct phases – the three figures in the drawing describe arrival, defiance, and acceptance. I also looked at female archetypes, the young maiden mother and the crone or wise woman. This character, in particular, was referencing the sentiments of that older generation – they very much saw themselves as part of British society, and that Britain was their home, they very much felt settled here. I had a sense of unease at the time though, so I gave the wise woman armor – I felt they needed to protect themselves. A year after I made the work the Windrush Scandal happened.
You’re very much an experimental and collaborative artist. Please tell us more about the Lumen Residency and Material Explorations –Indigo?
Yes, I do like to experiment, I like to travel between abstract and figuration with the work I make. I did the Lumen Residency during the first year of my MA. The residency is astronomy based, I had made ‘We are Here’ and ‘Infinity’ both of these works are about my understanding of the universe. I was overjoyed to have been accepted. We were 3 hours outside Rome in a small town called Atina high up in the hills around 800 meters above sea level. We spent a lot of time traveling to observatories looking at the stars and we made work. I made a life-sized Cyanotype (sun print), which involved lying in 42-degree heat for 15 minutes. The residency gave me the opportunity to collaborate with other artists, there were 28 of us from around Europe, USA and Canada. We lived and worked in a disused school for 2 weeks which was a great experience.
My material explorations with Indigo came out of my research for my final MA project and dissertation. I was interested in finding out as much as I could about the production of the Indigo plant during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As part of my research, I did a workshop with textile artist Lucille Junkere who had received a Winston Churchill Fellowship to travel around Africa to research indigo dying methods and learn about the symbolism connected to the Adire Cloth which is made with indigo dye.
After this workshop I was inspired to make some indigo explorations using stitch resist technique on Japanese paper – I wanted to see what came out of the making of these abstract forms, I hadn’t at this time decided what I wanted to do for my final work – ultimately it fed my drawing ‘The Return’ because I was connecting to the notion of ‘women’s work’ in the respect of something that would have been communal. The connection to craft is very strong in the Caribbean and Africa so I wanted to tune into that energy to prepare me for the work ahead. My abstract pieces allow me to access another language because sometimes I can get too caught up in my head, so the making and abstraction connects me more to a heart spaced energy.
Do you have anything else in the pipeline we can look forward to?
Ahh, well – I was one of 5 artists shortlisted for the 198 Gallery’s inaugural ‘Woman of Colour’ award. The winner is animation artist Maybelle Peters. All shortlisted artists will be in a group show at the 198 Gallery in early 2021, and we will receive a portfolio review and ongoing support over the year, so that is really exciting!
I am also planning to run some printmaking workshops from my studio, I used to make a lot of collagraphs about 10 years ago, I want to return to that because it is a beautiful textural, almost sculptural form of printmaking. It is also sustainable – no nasty chemicals involved and the printing plates are made with scraps of textured paper and ephemera.
So where can we keep up to date with your activities?
Well, I am on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mswatkiss/
My website is – https://charmainewatkiss.com/
I am on Twitter too – https://twitter.com/mswatkiss
This is my Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/mswatkiss
If you want to get invites to my private views then you can sign up for my newsletter here – bit.ly/2SBwlzU
We wish you the very best with your forthcoming show
Thank you!
Featured image: ‘We Are Here’
‘Me, Myself and I’ runs from 27 February – 10 June 2020. Please visit collyerbristow.com for further information.
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