Crafting a Difference, SoShiro, London, 1 January - 30 April 2021
Crafting a Difference brings together five galleries in the contemporary craft sector representing thirty-five artists in an exhibition filling townhouse gallery SoShiro. Brian Kennedy, the curator of this exhibition, wanted to develop projects to increase the visibility of the contemporary object within today's changed landscape.
Charlotte's artworks on show include Ghost Orchard, a large scale, intricate papercut in which natural and floral forms metamorphose together with her signature silhouettes of women to create fragile and ghostly presences. In her new series Women in Conversation, she responds to the floral and pastoral landscape motifs found on historical ware, in which Charlotte has disrupted the uniformity of image and surface by hand painting silhouettes of women. Although her women are isolated, they each attempt to communicate in various ways including through a megaphone and by sending messages via a paper airplane. These artworks follow Charlotte's involvement with collage as a working method to suggest a sense of fracture and of the uncanny that Covid-19 and the subsequent lock-down has created. The existing ware that Charlotte has used, with its idealized scenes and association with colonialism, is unsettled by her painted additions to suggest a sense of disquiet and questioning.
The exhibition can be experienced now via a virtual tour on the SoShiro website. Crafting A Difference will open at SoShiro once government restrictions are lifted.
View a Virtual Tour of this exhibition
Women in Conversation, Listening Flowers,2020, gold leaf, cold glaze, hand painting on earthenware Spode jug, plaster base. 13.5 x 18 cm