Legacy, curated by Helen Stalker, is the largest gathering of Charmaine Watkiss’ work in a public gallery space. The exhibition includes new drawings displayed alongside Witness, the artist’s multi-disciplinary installation originally commissioned for Liverpool Biennial (2023). Responding to the city’s maritime past and association with the slave trade, Watkiss saw Witness as an opportunity for healing; and it sits naturally next to her most recent work.

In Abbot Hall’s galleries seven and eight there are 17 artworks in total spanning three tranquil spaces. One grouping is informed by the artist’s extensive look into historic botanical collections, including a fellowship responding to the work of naturalist, physician and slave owner Sir Hans Sloane – founder of the British Museum. A trip to the Lake District in January this year also fed into research for the collection. Each piece includes reference to one or many of the following themes – archives, colonial collecting practices and trade, symbolism, folklore, the Middle Passage, spirituality, Afrofuturism, growing sustenance and the medicinal qualities of native plant-life. Crucially, Watkiss’ wider practice is concerned with the urgent crises of losing biodiversity and cultural diversity whilst emphasising the importance of both to our collective survival.

Watkiss’ work consists of pencil drawings, watercolour paints and inks punctuated by more unusual media such as gold leaf, clay and coffee. She creates narratives primarily through research connected to African and Caribbean diaspora, which is then mapped onto female figures. She draws herself as a conduit to relay stories which speak about a collective experience; starting with an idea, then allowing intuition and a dialogue with the work to take over. Addressing ritual, tradition, ancestry, mythology and cosmology, since her first gallery solo show (The Seed Keepers in 2021 with Tiwani Contemporary), she has investigated the herbal healing traditions of Caribbean women, especially those of her mother’s generation. Watkiss connects those traditions through colonisation back to their roots in Africa. Her first institutional solo show took place at Leeds Art Gallery, and since she has work acquired by The British Museum, The Government Art Collection and Abbot Hall Gallery. Fresh from having her work on display at the 60th Venice Biennale, and currently part of two other concurrent exhibitions, Watkiss’ global appeal continues to rise.

Watkiss and her contemporaries, Lubaina Himid, Alisha Wormsley, Alberta Whittle and others, explore concepts such as the Black Atlantic and Afrofuturism as ways to renegotiate a way through the long shadow of slavery. The Black Atlantic, an idea inspired by sociologist Paul Gilroy’s seminal book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), proposes that we critique modernity through a transnational and intercultural lens. Allowing for a visualisation of Black expressive cultures as ‘countercultures of modernity’ and ‘grounded aesthetics’ which carry ‘residual traces’ of racial terror, it also produces a distinct, critical and potentially emancipatory positionality from which to interact with the modern world.

In Watkiss’ work, her Warrior Women are elevated to positions of powerful reverence. Living totems burdened with a history that hangs heavy around them but perhaps not forever bound by it. Through Afrofuturism, artists of many interconnected and distinct disciplines have explored and continue to explore a vision of an equitable future that imagines spaces where people are able to thrive. The intersection of faith, knowledge and hope bound up in Afrofuturist narratives can also be applied to Watkiss’ figures, who sit throughout Legacy like family portraits, high priestesses of their traditions who are projected into the future in both attitudes and dress.

The new work addresses these concepts successfully, referencing that which is ancient as well as existences yet to be, creating a natural pause in front of each work, giving the viewer an opportunity to unpick prior narratives and to consider a future that holds space for Black expression and joy. Their intricate beauty becomes a tapestry of new possibilities.

There is something so intimate and generous in creating art about healing, and offering a glimpse into ancestral practices, that it is hard not to feel held while looking at these works. The sharing of histories changes them from purely aesthetic into an empowering tool. Reasons why this work could solely be focused on trauma are legion, but for Watkiss, it seems it is the growth that results from events and social constructs out of her control that need focus. Her Warrior Women are fully formed, bearing their wisdom, histories and their personalities through an intertwining of people and nature. These are ancestors and portraits both which are used as conduits to create a family of empowered figures. I imagine her being surrounded by their protection in her studio.

This brings to mind the words of Pelumi Odubanjo who, in a 2020 podcast on healing, said: “For me as a Black woman, artist, and curator, one of the biggest ways I can look after myself was by surrounding myself with positive visions of people that look like me and my community, both past and present.” Mixing African-derived mythology such as that found in stories of Babalú-Ayé and Obeah traditions with women as healers in indigenous knowledge systems, Watkiss reminds her audience of the potentials of Blackness when respected and thriving.

In tight focus is Watkiss’ idea that plants, just like humans, have different stages of spiritual development. In Legacy, this motif is expanded by adding to her botanical collection an aromatic spice historically known as negro pepper, as well as indigo dye, oil palm tree, cotton and tobacco plants. Some of these reference the industry of the North of England and how wealth was stockpiled during the Industrial Revolution and after, as resources of colonised nations were mercilessly exploited. Each embodiment is adorned in symbolism that gives the viewer more information about Watkiss’ train of thought.

By evoking moon rituals and characters from ancient mythology, these women are sacred, timeless, life-giving. All of the plants in her 2024 works have links to healing. The use of plant-life to signify both the vital nature of growing from the Earth and community practices is an opportune angle from which to approach the work of undoing the harm caused by an empire-led interest in specimens of the so-called Other. The medicine and sustenance derived from the qualities of aloe, cerasee, mahoe, lacebark, yam, callaloo, wawa tree, charcoal and kaolin clay is kept safe by the women who represent them, who then pass each piece of knowledge down generationally in exchanges of love and care.

There is something regal about the women in these images, which resemble an entire history of court portraiture that came before them. Traditionally this type of work would be painted from a side-on perspective with emphasis on dress and often concerned with stature and public reception. Unlike their forebears, Watkiss’ figures have no interest in connecting with the eyes of their viewer or their opinion of them; they have other concerns. Their gaze seems distant, they are deep in thought, perhaps connecting with a higher calling. Groupings of figures (as in Returning the Sacred Almanack and The Knowledge Pool for example) are casual and familiar, the women are relaxed in each other’s company and unconcerned with appearing to be formal. This is not at all like the traditions of white society portraiture hanging in many national galleries and suggests an intentional rewriting of genre. They feel real and full of personality; the denial of the gaze is just one way in which they value their own space more than the attention of any viewer. Narratives, as with Watkiss’ use of pencil and watercolour, are intentionally and delicately layered.

As she has said: “What I seek to extract through my narratives is stories of empowerment because when I read accounts I think, what is it about the human spirit that can survive such difficulty? So, the women I depict are very much empowered figures, it’s that resilience and strength I really want to draw on.”

There is much to see here and much to unpick. Watkiss’ work may never be done, but that is what is so exciting about this path she has embarked upon and continues to tread. This effort to inform through her art and, by doing so, chipping away at the blanket silences of large institutions still struggling to decolonise by repatriation of stolen property. To draw our attention to a different way of living, one that is slower and more deliberate. Legacy is in direct opposition to the fast-turning wheels of capitalism and the intentional destruction of community ideals, true history and ideas of belonging by right wing rhetoric. Bringing the many and disparate strands together in her work is an education we should all be grateful for.

Kirsty Jukes 

Charmaine Watkiss: Legacy continues at Lakeland Arts’ Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, until 28 December 2024. Tickets from £6-12 

Images: Returning the Sacred Almanack, 2024; The Warriors Way, Recalling the Lost Legacies, 2022; The Seed Sowers Almanack, 2022. Feature image: Safeguarding the Sacred Boundary of the Bountiful, detail, 2024. All © Charmaine Watkiss 

See more from the artist on her website charmainewatkiss.com