Charmaine Watkiss and Michael Ohajuru.

Charmaine Watkiss In conversation with Michael Ohajuru

Join us for a special ‘In Conversation’ event with acclaimed artist and former City Lit student Charmaine Watkiss, who’ll be interviewed by cultural historian Michael Ohajuru in celebration of this year’s Art History Festival.

Charmaine Watkiss’s work explores the botanical legacy of the Caribbean and the healing traditions passed down through generations of women. Her striking ‘Plant Warrior’ portraits and sculptural work draw on archives, ancestry and Enlightenment-era art history to tell powerful ‘memory stories’ about the colonial past.

Charmaine completed her Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at City Lit in 2015. Within a decade, her work was held in the collections of the British Museum and the Wellcome Collection, and her recent Sloane Lab Fellowship led to a brass sculpture now on permanent display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery. In this conversation she and Michael will talk about that journey, from our studios to some of the country’s leading institutions. There’ll also be a chance to put your own questions to Charmaine.

Charmaine Watkiss is known for her research-based drawing practice, which focuses on plant knowledge handed down through generations of Caribbean families, tracing their lineage to Africa via the transatlantic slave trade. She is particularly interested in healing traditions passed down the maternal line, reflected in her work through constructed narratives around women. She draws herself, but these are not self-portraits; instead, they are a vehicle for conveying stories about a collective experience.  

Watkiss is best known for her ongoing ‘Plant Warrior’ series, which features empowered, regal figures representing various Caribbean plants. These women are proud and upright with a wallpaper backdrop – their formality referencing art historical portraiture of the Enlightenment era as a way of speaking about the colonial. Around their necks are the fruit or flower of the particular healing plant they convey, each with its own story to tell; some also reference a deeper connection to the cosmos.  Watkiss has an upcoming solo show that takes the plant warrior neckpieces into the realm of 3D sculpture, a major commission for The New Art Gallery in Walsall. This sculptural installation will form part of the gallery’s permanent collection.  

Charmaine Watkiss’s work is held in international private and public collections.

Michael I. Ohajuru holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University (2024), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He writes, lectures and speaks widely on the Black presence in Renaissance Europe and British art collections, presenting at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery, Tate Britain, the British Library, the National Archives and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 2010 he founded Image of the Black in London Galleries, a series of gallery tours highlighting Black presences in London’s national collections. He is Project Director of The John Blanke Project, a contemporary art and archive initiative celebrating John Blanke, the Black trumpeter at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Ohajuru was also co-convener of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies’ What’s Happening in Black British History workshop series and is a founder member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network. Through his research, writing and public engagement, he continues to foster greater understanding of Black histories in Britain and their place within the nation’s cultural heritage.