Artwork From Home: Charmaine Watkiss
Charmaine Watkiss began her creative career in fashion design, producing handmade couture footwear for several years before returning to school to earn a degree in contemporary media practice. With a background in film, photography, and commercial design, Watkiss would go on to earn an MA in drawing from the Wimbledon College of Art. Watkiss’s multi-faceted practice shares “memory stories” of transatlantic African Carribean diasporas through pencil and paper, cyanotype, bookmaking, and mixed media that incorporates prints, painting, and found objects. Born and raised in London, Watkiss’s work has been exhibited across the country. Most recently, Watkiss was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and the 198 Gallery Womxn of Color Award, as well as completed the Lumen Studios residency in Atina, Italy. In addition to working as a fine artist, Watkiss has led seminars and workshops on figurative drawing and collagraph printing. You can learn more about projects on her website and Instagram.
When did you first begin making art?
I guess I have always made art, as a kid I was always inventing things, making bits of sculpture or sewing. I started to make art seriously, though, about 6 years ago. At that time, I had been a digital designer for about 16 years and was getting frustrated with sitting in front of a computer every day, so I began my formal art education part-time.
What does your workspace look like now?
I have a really nice big studio in Woolwich, right by the Thames Barrier. Mine is one of 450 studios on the river, we have a great community, the studios are purpose-built, professionally managed, and affordable so I feel very lucky.
How have present circumstances affected your creativity?
Well, my figure drawings are normally life sized, so I can’t work on them at home. So, I have started to make smaller A4 sized drawings, which have been an interesting experience. I am having to figure out how best to render them, trying different ways of drawing. The size of the work affects one’s relationship to it, so I have had to take that into consideration too.
Your 2013 sketchbook, “Inspired by nature,” is rich with paper cutouts and illustrations of seeds and botanical forms. Can you talk about the process of creating the sketchbook?
I had completely forgotten about that sketchbook! It was made at a time when I thought I could continue work as a designer and make art in my spare time. I had bought a gorgeous book called Seeds: Time Capsules of Life and wanted to create my response to the beautiful images in that book. I made lots of pencil studies, then I took an experimental approach by cutting, layering and overlaying shapes on top of each other (for the cover) as well as working with watercolor and metallic gold paint, making some of the plants into almost religious icons. Getting closer to nature was very important to me at the time, so in hindsight it is not surprising that I am making art full time using pencil and paper as my starting point.
What or who do you look to for inspiration?
Wow, I have so many sources of inspiration. Much of my work is informed by historical research, I love Medieval manuscripts and iconography so I have made many visits to the British Library. I am inspired by couture fashion, because these types of clothing are often very sculptural in form. The designer Iris van Herpen springs to mind, as well as the late Alexander McQueen. I listen to a lot of music, particularly jazz. I have started to reconnect to my love of film too (I did my undergrad degree in film). In the art world I am inspired by the work of Kymia Nawabi, Barbara Walker, Phoebe Boswell, Claudette Johnson, Wangechi Mutu, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Jenny Saville, Nidhal Chamekh to name but a few, all of whom work with the figure and bring something unique to the practice of drawing.
How has drawing changed the way you see the world?
Drawing has made me observe more, and to ask a lot of questions. It has opened up my curiosity and made me appreciate simple things. I do spend a lot of time just looking.
Your body of work ranges from hand-altered books and full-body cyanotypes to material studies of indigo and video recordings of cat’s cradle inspired by cosmology. Can you speak about the histories at play within your practice?
Much of my historical research has been concerned with untold histories of the African diaspora. My first large drawing Lost/Found was a response to me wanting to know why a street close to where I live was called Jamaica Road. Through my research, I discovered that the borough I live in had strong connections to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I had gathered a huge amount of information and didn’t know what to do with it. I was on the final unit of my art foundation and someone suggested I do a self-portrait because my family are from Jamaica and some of the information I uncovered connected with my family history. I wanted to challenge myself by making a drawing which was life sized. That was the start of my practice, really. I tend to undertake research which tells a wider story—so I don’t see any of my drawings as self portraits, they are instead characters who are telling stories connected to the research I have made.
Much of what I research tends to speak about the cyclical nature of history, and some pieces end up saying much more than I had anticipated, because ultimately the work tells me what to do, not the other way around. My research on indigo and it’s production on the plantations of America and the Caribbean lead me to make The Return, which really connects to loss, ancestral reverence, and being between worlds. It is important for me to connect to an emotion in order to make these works because ultimately they are about the human experience.
I often ask myself when researching ‘I wonder what was happening in the skies (astrologically) at that time.’ I had a childhood love of astrology and astronomy so themes around this started to creep into my work a couple of years ago. I was then lucky enough to be accepted onto a residency in Atina, Italy—which is a few hours drive from Rome. It was an astronomy-based residency so we (28 international artists) spent a lot of time visiting different observatories up in the mountains and observing the night sky. I love the act of doing field based research and would like to incorporate it more in my practice.
Since making The Return, (which has been in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing prize touring exhibition), I have been looking at ancestral traditions which survived the middle passage, thus giving rise to many religious belief systems. Focusing on the Caribbean in particular this strand of research connects with my love of history and my love of the cosmos.
What role do sketchbooks have in your art-making process?
I use small, unlined Moleskine notebooks to sketch any ideas that come to mind, creating a repository for potential future projects. I also make detailed notes about what I am working on. I use bigger sketchbooks for trying out new techniques—or figuring out how I might draw something that will go into a bigger work. I also like copying master drawings so I will do this here too. I carry my small notebook with me everywhere I go.
What are some materials you can’t live without?
Pencils and paper are a must!
How do you get through creative blocks?
What tends to work for me is playing with material, without having any particular outcome in mind. Once I have made a mark—usually with watercolor or inks then I start to see possibilities. I don’t always remember that though, so I can spend hours agonizing! Play is important.
What’s the best piece of art-making advice you ever received?
Treat art making like writing poetry. A tutor on my art foundation (which I completed in 2015) told me that.
At the time I was struggling to make work which was not too literal—because I came from the world of graphic design and advertising I was finding it difficult to respond to my subject instead of ‘answering a brief.’ My tutor at the time had also come from a graphic design background so understood my situation. So the advice was to take away as much from the work as possible, until just the essence remains, just as you would do if you were writing a poem. So I remind myself of this often.
How can people support your work?