When the artist Charmaine Watkiss was a child, she frequently visited G Baldwin\u2019s, a herbalist who sold natural remedies and essential oils in London\u2019s Elephant and Castle, to pick up medicinal herbs and sarsaparilla for her mother. \u201cThey\u2019ve had an apothecary for over 100 years,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a place Black women used as a resource in the 1970s and 80s. You\u2019d say: \u2018I\u2019ve got this ailment\u2019 and they\u2019d recommend something.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watkiss\u2019s mother was part of the Windrush generation who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK, and these memories sparked a new area of research for the artist before her first gallery show in 2021, The Seed Keepers, which explored the botanical links connecting the Caribbean, the UK and the African continent in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. \u201cWhile in my studio, I thought: all this knowledge must have travelled with the enslaved.\u201d Thus began Watkiss\u2019s large-scale illustrated portraits depicting women of African descent alongside medicinal plants. Evoking historical botanical illustrations, the artist traces how the enslaved relied on herbal knowledge for survival.<\/p>\n
\u2018All this knowledge must have travelled with the enslaved\u2019 \u2026 The Warrior mediates all the forces of nature by Charmaine Watkiss. Photograph: Charmaine Watkiss<\/p>\n
Watkiss is talking ahead of an exhibition of newly commissioned works at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, where she was invited to create new work that engages directly with the institution\u2019s holdings. She immediately noticed an absence. \u201cI needed to respond to the West Africa display as the story of the diaspora was missing,\u201d she says. \u201cI needed to speak to the people who were taken away from the continent \u2013 my ancestors \u2013 and speak about the diaspora through material.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watkiss used the opportunity to do something different: her usual way of producing work involves drawing on paper, but after encountering RAMM\u2019s collections of masks, she turned to sculpture. The artist was particularly drawn to the mukenga helmet masks designed to cover the wearer\u2019s face, originating from the Kuba kingdom in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and traditionally made with materials such as cowrie shells and glass beads. \u201cMy mask will be in the cabinet with all the other African masks,\u201d she says. \u201cInterestingly, they\u2019ve got some masks on loan from the British Museum too, so there is a dialogue.\u201d Her RAMM commission also includes a new watercolour which incorporates some of the museum\u2019s holdings, such as a nkisi figure, traditionally used for purposes including healing and protection. \u201cWith sculpture, I work intuitively. With drawing, it\u2019s research \u2013 then the drawing takes over,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Watkiss\u2019s journey to becoming an artist wasn\u2019t straightforward. She worked as a footwear designer in the late 1980s but faced discrimination from those she worked alongside in the industry. She later turned her attention to studying film, and one tutor told her: \u201cBlack people made no contribution to western civilisation.\u201d She wrote her dissertation to prove him wrong. Later, in 2015, she devised a five-year plan: \u201cI wrote that within five years I wanted to become an artist. I had no idea how it would happen.\u201d She embarked on a foundation course at City Lit in London before starting an MA in illustration at Wimbledon School of Art<\/a>. In January 2020, Watkiss shut down her old work website and took a giant leap of faith. She credits this decision in part to also practising reiki. \u201cWhen you heal someone, you align all their energy to an intention. I used myself to test that idea, and it worked. It\u2019s a process of hurling yourself into the unknown and trusting you\u2019re not going to die when you jump.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018With sculpture, I work intuitively\u2019 \u2026 Mukenga helmet mask from the DRC. Photograph: Charmaine Watkiss<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time Watkiss has responded to historic museum collections and narratives: she has held research fellowship stints at the Sloane Lab in partnership with the Natural History Museum and the British Museum. \u201cI wanted to find out what Hans Sloane and his contemporaries knew about healing plants, as many specimens were collected by enslaved Africans,\u201d she says. A work commissioned last year is currently on view at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery, placed alongside a portrait of physicist and collector Sloane. He was an owner of enslaved people in Jamaica and gained substantial profits from his wife\u2019s sugar plantations \u2013 his collection formed the foundation of the British Museum, and he owned the land on which Sloane Street and Sloane Square in London now stand. Watkiss reimagines a woman Sloane wrote about in an 18th-century volume as a \u201cqueen in her own country\u201d who helped to cure a growth on Sloane\u2019s foot.<\/p>\n I ask Watkiss about the difficulties of working with legacies of race and the enslaved within western museological collections. \u201cIt\u2019s a hard, complicated history,\u201d she says. \u201cThat trauma is generational \u2013 it\u2019s in our DNA. Growing up in western culture, being viewed a certain way \u2013 it\u2019s another layer.\u201d In her response to Sloane\u2019s portrait, Watkiss replaces him at the centre of the story with the woman once relegated to the margins: the healer is depicted seated on a throne, rich with symbolism including the sankofa bird, an Akan symbol of looking back to move forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the artist Charmaine Watkiss was a child, she frequently visited G Baldwin\u2019s, a herbalist who sold natural…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-267464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}