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 engages m*therhood, domestic ritual, diaspora, and the littoral through constraint and locality. The maternal informs the structure of the practice, shaping a way of thinking grounded in inheritance and material condition. Drawing from lived interiors, she considers how memory adheres to surface and how emotional and relational states are carried within the ordinary.

Working across painting, text, installation, sound, photography, performance, and film, she employs everyday materials as both medium and site, allowing them to hold and transmit experience. In dialogue with abstraction, layered compositions negotiate containment and exposure, intimacy and distance. The work unfolds from within the conditions it inhabits.

Research
Alongside her studio practice, Charmaine contributes to contemporary feminist discourse examining the formation and transmission of maternal knowledge across interrupted lineages. Informed by Matricentric Feminism and motherhood studies, the research engages ongoing debates around the maternal as a critical and generative framework.

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 mixed‑heritage identity and estrangement from her Caribbean relatives. Later relocating to the outskirts of the seaside military town of Portsmouth, she was shaped by British working‑class culture set against the landscape 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 realism of 1990s and early 2000s. Her work is grounded in lived experience, place, and story.

CV