My guest today is the artist Charmaine Watkiss, whose extraordinary creative journey took her through film, shoemaking, and advertising before she became fully wedded to her art practice. It’s a path that has given her work a deep sense of craft, storytelling and material sensitivity and I know will inspire so many of you.
Her paintings are held in public collections across the UK, and she is currently showing a new commission in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture.
We explore how Charmaine actually accesses her ideas. She describes the physical rituals that help her enter a flow state in the studio, how drawing, sculpture, and painting each unlock different ways of thinking, and why the work itself often reveals its direction through the materials.
We also talk about responding to museum collections, including her recent commission From the ones who came before… for Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, where she worked with objects from the museum’s World Cultures galleries to imagine the women who carried botanical knowledge across the African diaspora.
We explore why her own figure often appears in the work, and the quiet but powerful role plants play in her paintings as carriers of memory, healing, and connection.
It’s a fascinating conversation about intuition, research, ancestry, and the slow unfolding of ideas through making.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Ideas often begin as something half-visible - a feeling or fragment sensed before it can be understood. The work starts by accessing that inner terrain. Then the materials speak back, slowly revealing a direction you couldn’t have predicted.
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Working with collections isn’t neutral; artists are in dialogue with what’s missing as much as with what’s there. Teasing out and sharing knowledge that would otherwise be lost or misrepresented.
BEST MOMENTS
“My wanting to connect to plants is because plants have the answers, and plants give us life as well.”
“I'm not really interested in making work about trauma. I'm interested in making work about emancipation and about healing.”
“She is not trying to claim a definitive narrative. Instead, she creates space for memory, reflection, and reverence. Her practice reminds us that art can be a form of cultural care and repair.”
EPISODE RESOURCES
https://www.instagram.com/mswatkiss
HOST BIO
With over 35 years in the art world, Ceri has worked closely with leading artists and arts professionals, managed public and private galleries and charities, and curated more than 250 exhibitions and events. She has sold artworks to major museums and private collectors and commissioned thousands of works across diverse media, from renowned artists such as John Akomfrah, Pipilotti Rist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Vito Acconci. Now, she wants to share her extensive knowledge with you, so you can excel and achieve your goals.
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Unlock Your Artworld Network Self Study Course
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Book a Discovery Call
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Discover Your Extraordinary Creativity
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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/
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