Picture this. I have become highly aware of the young Australian tourist next to me at the bus stop in Kendal, not because she is back-packing and worrying about her transport connections – that is a familiar enough sight in this tourist hotspot, with its fantastically misted high hills just out of town. What catches my eye is the bottle of big brand chocolate milk she drinks from. I imagine she chose this drink as something vaguely substantial to keep her going. It was claimed that the inventor of chocolate milk was the physician, botanist and collector who visited Jamaica in 1687, Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), though of course it wasn’t. Sloane is also one of the historical figures that Charmaine Watkiss’s new show Legacy references. I wonder if the young tourist knows this.
Watkiss’s focus is on what is now called ‘indigenous’ knowledge, especially the plant knowledge of traditional healing that West African societies brought to the Caribbean, because this is the journey of her own British heritage. The work is a series of pencil drawings that calmly detail the botanical knowledge that helped, for instance, enslaved women of African descent survive through horror using the cotton plant, its roots chewed as a means of fertility control. Her own relationship with the plants of Jamaica, passed down by her mother from a young age, led her to investigate and respond to the influence of Sloane, and is the largest gathering of her work to date. The exhibition is in Abbot Hall, one of the leading UK galleries, established in 1962 in a Grade I listed Georgian building on the banks of the River Kent that runs through the town.
Works in the exhibition cleverly reference the work of botanical illustrator Elizabeth Blackwell (1700-1758), who was encouraged by Sloane to produce the drawings for A Curious Herbal, published in weekly instalments between 1737 and 1739. Back when Sloane was scouring Jamaica for new and interesting botany, the European culture he had departed had just suffered 300 years of witch trials, particularly oppressing women who knew how to help other women regulate their own bodies’ functions through the use of plants and herbs. With this history in mind, in the present, Watkiss’s pictures speak to me. About the natural cycles of the human world and how entangled it is with the quiet workings of elemental forces, how women – as or becoming elders – collected knowledge for cure or curse, and where the natural pathways for women’s self-care are now.
The focus of Watkiss’s work also explores how particular plants enslaved people brought with them, or discovered through enslavement, link to astral movement and the age old agricultural practice of growing and gathering according to celestial conditions – a garden-farming methodology practised all over the world, that unites rather than divides women from different cultures. In ‘Safeguarding the sacred boundary of the bountiful’ (2024), for instance, Watkiss as model is drawn seated, garlanded by oil palm ripened berries with a background of fronds, holding a wooden trading boat. Palm oil, made from these berries, became synonymous with the Industrial Revolution when it was used as a lubricant, but the continuing demand for it is now decimating environments all over the world. Most of this series of drawings, as well as using astral symbols, include the artist’s image (she does not refer to them as self-portraits). The use of the artist’s own image as a repeated motif, as well as the placing of a British woman of colour in a natural rather than urban environment, is a conscious decision by the artist. One that Watkiss says she uses ‘as a conduit to relay stories which speak about a collective experience’. (In Sloane’s time and beyond over 65% of enslaved cane field workers in the Caribbean were women.)
The repetition also gently insists on the female artist’s resistance to invisibility, both in culture and within the issues of ecological health. Watkiss’ images are not of an invented world, but one that connects to the coupling of plants and cosmology, growing cycles, healing, ordering the universe to locate the self in its geography and culture, and redefining a rebut to classic gender and race ‘norms’. Ambitious and culturally vital in their exploratory ideas, the pictures reveal that her practice is one of careful crafting. There are concepts contained within each frame that are worthy of contemplation. The way she has explored her own personhood and the elements that make up her different ‘selves’ give insights into the lives of the women who survived and continue to survive the industrialisation of human physicality. The pieces of cartography-style soft pencil drawings require the viewer to pay close attention to perceive the voice each piece produces, but it’s worth it; what the artist has to say with her ideas resonates for days.
Legacy as an exhibition is rather like seeing a series of meticulous maps that lead towards the final piece. In its own room, ‘Witness’ (2023), is a mixed media installation conceived as a space for healing and contemplation. Here Watkiss shows her power as an artist. The piece produced a moment where I felt physically and emotionally stilled. The artist’s image here in this separate room is Watkiss as a river goddess made of sculpted clay, surrounded by the ephemera of international trade that has risen from the oceans with her.
As I wandered back into town after the viewing and met the girl with the chocolate milkshake, who was waiting with me for the rail replacement bus, my thoughts were only of kinship. I wondered if she, on her long-distance travels, was in the process of clearing herself a path in the search for her natural self. And now, I think it would be a great shame if she never gets the chance to also fully understand the complicated histories represented by that bottle of chocolate milk.
Chantal Oakes is a writer artist based in Preston, Lancashire.
Charmaine Watkiss: Legacy, Abbot Hall, Kendal, 20 July – 28 December 2024.
This review is supported by Lakeland Arts.
Published 02.08.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,052 words