B. 1985. Margate, UK. Lives and works in London, UK.

MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art, London, 2025

Recipient of the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship 2024/25

Charmaine’s work emerges at the intersection of m*therhood, domestic ritual, diaspora, and the littoral through constraint, locality, and improvisation. Working across painting, sculpture, sound installation, photography, performance, and film, she channels automatic and subconscious processes into bodily poetics. Grounded in abstract expressionism, her practice is defined by energetic, gestural mark-making that builds tactile, multi‑dimensional surfaces channeling ephemeral states of being and internal landscapes. Found objects are intuitively incorporated to create juxtapositions between everyday materials and underlying emotional currents. Charmaine’s work harmonises beauty and intensity, inviting viewers into a visceral dialogue between materiality and inner experience. Her compositions merge the mundane with the deeply felt, creating sensory immediacy through subtle yet powerful visual dialogues. It is releasing, cathartic and anarchic.

Biography
Born on England’s south coast to an English mother and a British‑born Jamaican father, Charmaine grew up on a Margate council estate navigating the complexities of mixed‑heritage identity. Estranged from her Caribbean roots and relatives and later moving to the outskirts of the seaside military town of Portsmouth, she became influenced by the nuances of her British working‑class culture against the whimsical backdrop of the South Downs. Originally trained as a classical actor, she moved into stage and film direction and writing before developing a visual practice that fuses autobiography with the gritty British realism of the 1990s and early 2000s. The result is a distinctive language shaped by lived experience, place, and story.

CV