Hello, my name is Charmaine Watkiss. I’m a London-based artist.
My work explores botanical legacies of the Caribbean. I’m particularly interested in the healing practices and relationships to plants and nature that African-descended women have.
My art practice came out of memories of my mum treating me and my brother with herbs. It occurred to me that this herbal knowledge must have travelled across the Atlantic, along with the enslaved. I began to think about how culture is formed through migration – and about what things people carry with them, and what is left behind or erased.
Placed within a niche in the wall and protected behind glass, my sculpture ‘Still Waters’ is a 40 cm-high clay bust of a woman captured in a moment of serenity. Her eyes are closed, as are her full lips. Her dark brown terracotta skin is smooth and her high forehead is framed by thick kanerows – tight braids laid in continuous raised rows along the scalp – starting from a centre parting. They blend with her head and neck in an unbroken dark brown.
The woman’s short, bell-shaped torso is adorned with a golden cloak made from hammered brass, the shiny tiles overlapping like fish scales. The front of the cloak is open, revealing a neat garment of pale yellow woven raffia, which bursts out into a bushy cluster from beneath a 2 cm-wide copper band crossing her chest, disrupting the stillness of the figure. A raw flax crochet mat peeks out from beneath the base of the sculpture.
I use materials and techniques that connect to traditions of making on the African continent. Lots of women in the diaspora who have been displaced from Africa have used handcraft to make things to earn extra money to survive. This is a historical thing but it’s happening in the present day as well.
Two small brown glass bottles are placed in front of the bust, like offerings arranged on an altar. One contains a ‘cerasee’ tincture (made from the plant Momordica charantia), which is used to detoxify the body, and the other, lemon balm (from Melissa officinalis), which is used to calm stress and anxiety. Both are used widely throughout the Caribbean and I have placed them here as a symbolic support for the ancestors who endured the difficult journey across the Atlantic.
The title of the sculpture, ‘Still Waters’, alludes to the phrase “still waters run deep”. In Britain we have only scratched the surface in talking about the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The flow of ocean currents was also a flow of people – my ancestors were forced across the ocean to be placed on plantations to work, and people today are still crossing oceans, risking their lives.
On each side of the sculpture are portrait drawings of women from my ‘Plant Warrior’ series, who are preserving and holding sacred knowledge of medicinal plants used by African-descended women. There is one drawing on the left, and three to the right. These women have the same face but reflect a multitude of imagined ancestors. All of the women have elaborate kanerow hairstyles, where rows of braids meet at the forehead in a tightly wound coil, or two-strand twists are gathered into a regal updo. They wear their neckpieces embellished with the fruits and seeds of specific plants: plump red seeds of the peppery Aframomum melegueta, delicate yellow flowers of the shea plant, bushy stalks of rice. Aframomum melegueta was a much sought-after spice used as a purgative, to reduce inflammation and to increase breast milk.
Some of the plants in my drawings were carried to the Caribbean by enslaved people, who hid seeds in their hair during the transatlantic journey, then cultivated them in small gardens for their own use. Colonial botanists gained a lot of medicinal knowledge from enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, and this debt has only recently begun to be acknowledged.
The women in my drawings are seated in dignified, formal poses – backs upright, hands folded in their laps – that resemble the poses in historic oil paintings, or photographic portraits of people with a colonial history. Their faces are turned slightly so that they look away from us – it’s intriguing to wonder what they are thinking about.
In the large, life-size drawing on the far left, called ‘The Matriarch I’, three women are posed together in a more relaxed style. One woman stands with her back to us, a red-and-yellow peacock flower spread across her back. Another kneels, her eyes closed, with her head on the lap of the third woman, who is seated with a sage plant hanging in a pouch around her neck. I’ve drawn the women in graphite, but the plants they carry are in watercolour. Sometimes I incorporate other materials such as coffee, or Reckitt’s Blue, which is an ultramarine blue pigment that is used to whiten clothes during washing.
At the forefront of the drawing is a pair of green manchineel apples in a glass bell jar, with a “do not touch” sign. Many of the plants in my drawings were used for healing, but some, such as the manchineel apple, were also used by the enslaved as a poison, for liberation.
This is the end of Stop 4.