Charmaine Watkiss Transforms Museum Spaces with Ancestral Narratives
Charmaine Watkiss, a British artist of Windrush descent, is reshaping how UK museums engage with colonial histories through her evocative works that blend botanical illustration with traditional craft. Her latest exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter represents a significant intervention into institutional narratives, directly confronting absences in the representation of the African diaspora.
From Childhood Memories to Artistic Mission
Watkiss's artistic journey finds its roots in childhood visits to G Baldwin's herbalist in Elephant and Castle, where her mother sought natural remedies. "They've had an apothecary for over 100 years," Watkiss recalls. "It was a crucial resource for Black women in the 1970s and 80s. You'd describe an ailment, and they'd recommend something." These early experiences with herbal knowledge planted seeds that would later blossom into her acclaimed 2021 exhibition, The Seed Keepers, which explored botanical connections between the Caribbean, UK, and Africa within the context of the transatlantic slave trade.
The artist's research led her to a profound realisation: "While in my studio, I thought: all this knowledge must have travelled with the enslaved." This insight inspired her large-scale illustrated portraits that depict women of African descent alongside medicinal plants, consciously evoking historical botanical illustrations while tracing how enslaved people relied on herbal knowledge for survival.
Confronting Institutional Absences in Exeter
When invited to create new work for RAMM's collections, Watkiss immediately identified a critical gap. "I needed to respond to the West Africa display as the story of the diaspora was missing," she explains. "I needed to speak to the people who were taken away from the continent – my ancestors – and speak about the diaspora through material."
This commission prompted Watkiss to expand her artistic practice beyond her signature drawings. After encountering RAMM's collection of African masks, particularly mukenga helmet masks from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she turned to sculpture for the first time. "My mask will be in the cabinet with all the other African masks," she notes. "Interestingly, they've got some masks on loan from the British Museum too, so there is a dialogue."
The exhibition also features a new watercolour incorporating museum artefacts like nkisi figures, traditionally used for healing and protection. Watkiss describes her dual approach: "With sculpture, I work intuitively. With drawing, it's research – then the drawing takes over."
A Non-Linear Path to Artistic Recognition
Watkiss's route to becoming an established artist was anything but conventional. After working as a footwear designer in the late 1980s and facing industry discrimination, she studied film, where one tutor claimed "Black people made no contribution to western civilisation." She wrote her dissertation specifically to disprove this assertion.
In 2015, she devised an ambitious five-year plan: "I wrote that within five years I wanted to become an artist. I had no idea how it would happen." After foundation studies at City Lit and an MA in illustration at Wimbledon School of Art, she made a decisive leap in January 2020 by shutting down her old work website. She attributes this courage partly to her practice of reiki: "It's a process of hurling yourself into the unknown and trusting you're not going to die when you jump."
Engaging with Complex Colonial Legacies
Watkiss has previously engaged with museum collections through research fellowships at the Sloane Lab, partnering with the Natural History Museum and British Museum. Her investigation focused on "what Hans Sloane and his contemporaries knew about healing plants, as many specimens were collected by enslaved Africans."
A recent commission currently displayed at London's National Portrait Gallery places her work alongside a portrait of Sloane – a slave owner who profited from Jamaican sugar plantations and whose collection formed the British Museum's foundation. Watkiss reimagines a woman Sloane mentioned in an 18th-century volume as a "queen in her own country" who helped cure his foot ailment, centering her instead of Sloane.
When asked about working with legacies of race and enslavement in western museums, Watkiss acknowledges the complexity: "It's a hard, complicated history. That trauma is generational – it's in our DNA. Growing up in western culture, being viewed a certain way – it's another layer." In her response to Sloane's portrait, she replaces him with the healer, depicting her on a throne adorned with symbols including the sankofa bird, representing learning from the past to move forward.
Charmaine Watkiss: For the Ones Who Came Before continues at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter until 16 August, offering visitors a powerful re-examination of museum narratives through the lens of diaspora experience and ancestral knowledge.
