Charmaine Watkiss: Legacy at Abbot Hall
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions EditorAbbot Hall presents a solo exhibition from Charmaine Watkiss: Legacy gathers a collection of drawings exploring the relationship between humans and nature.
Watkiss takes a closer look at what she descibes as “memory states”: history, ritual, tradition and ancestry. She is interested in plants, healing herbs and their larger cultural significance in relation to the African Caribbean diaspora.
Her delicate drawings are often large in size but subtle in style, with faint pencil lines sometimes enhanced by the use of watercolour. There is a tenderness in her portraits of women intertwined with natural elements. Legacy also includes the installation Witness (2023) originally commissioned for Liverpool Biennial 2023, ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’, consisting of life-sized drawings and sculpture.