Charmaine Watkiss at Leeds City Art Gallery

'The Wisdom Tree' is the title of an exhibition of the work of Charmaine Watkiss that is on at the Leeds City Art Gallery. It celebrates the wisdom, strength and resilience of women of African descent and is part of a wider celebration of the contribution of Jamaican culture to society as a whole. Her images are of female guardians, mythic figures that are based partly in Watkiss's personal experiences and partly on more cosmic reflections on spirituality, on a rethinking of history and on a need to find images that celebrate the position of women as both caring humans and as role models for future generations. 

The exhibition is centred around three types of drawings. A vitrine houses sketchbooks and drawn studies of certain elements that will become symbols within the more finished drawings, small framed drawings under glass focus on the individual figures that have so far emerged from Watkiss's interests in fusing the individual with the mythic and large drawings attached to the walls by magnets, which are the 'statement' images, that carry the main weight of the ideas by combining the various aspects of her research and bringing them together in single images. 

From actual events, such as the 'Windrush scandal' via ancient processes such as alchemy, Watkiss puts together ideas that as an audience you need to unpick as symbolic messages. This is an old practice one that goes back thousands of years and it is one that you can still see around the city of Leeds in the Victorian Quarter. Personification, often using the image of a woman, allows for the representation of abstract qualities in a human form. In the image below from a mosaic in one of the Victorian arcades in Leeds, 'Industry' is symbolised by the hammer that the woman carries. 

Leeds Victorian arcade mosaic of 'Industry'

Watkiss however personalises these personifications, these images are understood as individualised women, each one reflecting something of her experience of being a black woman living in a society where Watkiss has at times felt as if she is an outsider. These women are both personifications and persons. Her own culture is where Watkiss derives wisdom, this is where her roots are and in recognising this she is able to stand proud and both accept her heritage and use it as a symbol for a wider need to rethink our collective colonial past. 

Large images and a detail

Studies for symbols

Studies for symbols

Notebooks

Large images hung with magnets

Charmaine Watkiss

This is a small exhibition but it is nevertheless very interesting and well worth going to the City Art Gallery to check out. For myself the most interesting aspect was the raising of individual portraits into personifications. These images reminded me of portraits of Queen Elizabeth the first. They are also personifications, but underneath all that white paint, they are also portraits of an individual woman. 

Queen Elizabeth the First of England by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger

Coda

I went to the talk and poetry reading that was given by Charmaine Watkiss alongside the poet and academic Dr. Rommi Smith in relation to this exhibition. This illuminating evening made me very aware of how the arts can cross fertilise each other. Rommi Smith in particular as a poet opens doors into alternative ways of understanding situations that visual artists would perhaps find very hard to do. Listen to her powerfully unravelling her own responses to another art form, Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending here.  

See also:

Portraits and time

Self portrait drawings