This week, I’m joined by the artist Charmaine Watkiss, whose extraordinary creative journey has taken her through film, shoemaking and advertising before she fully committed to her art practice. Each stage of that path has left its mark, giving her work a deep sense of craft, storytelling and material sensitivity that feels both grounded and expansive.
Today, Charmaine’s 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. Her work continues to evolve across drawing, painting and sculpture, each medium offering a different way of thinking and sensing.
In this conversation, we explore how Charmaine accesses her ideas and the physical rituals that help her enter a flow state in the studio. She describes how drawing, sculpture and painting each unlock something distinct, and how the work itself often begins to reveal its direction through the materials rather than through fixed intention.
We also talk about her responses to museum collections, including her recent commission From the ones who came before… for Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery. In this work, she engaged with objects from the museum’s World Cultures collections, imagining the women who carried botanical knowledge across the African diaspora.
We explore why her own figure often appears in her work, and the quiet but powerful role that plants play throughout her paintings as carriers of memory, healing and connection. At its heart, this is a conversation about intuition, research, ancestry and the slow unfolding of ideas through making.
What We Learned from Charmaine Watkiss
Listening to Charmaine, it becomes clear that her work is not about looking back at history as something fixed or distant. It is about reactivating it. Through careful research, symbolism and storytelling, she brings forward voices and lineages that were obscured, fragmented or forgotten.
What stays with you is the tenderness in her approach. She is not trying to define a single narrative or close meaning down. Instead, she opens space for reflection, memory and reverence. Her practice becomes a form of cultural care and repair, acknowledging what has been lost while honouring what has endured.
There is also something deeply powerful in the way her ideas begin. A museum visit. A cabinet of objects. A moment of absence that becomes visible only when it is noticed. From these small encounters, entire bodies of work emerge.
Perhaps the invitation in Charmaine’s work is to look again. To notice the knowledge carried quietly through families and communities. To pay attention to the silences as much as the stories. And to recognise that creativity can be one of the ways we keep histories alive.
