In Conversation
Charmaine Watkiss

Biographies

Charmaine Watkiss RWA is a nationally acclaimed British artist who investigates the botanical legacy of the Caribbean through a research-led practice involving drawing, sculpture and installation. She is particularly interested in healing traditions handed down through the maternal line through oral culture and direct experience. Solo exhibitions include The things we hold sacred, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2026-2027); Legacy, Abbots Hall, Kendal (2024) and The Wisdom Tree, Leeds Art Gallery (2022). Watkiss’s work has appeared in important group exhibitions including In Praise of Black Errantry, Palazzo Pisani S. Marina (Venice Biennale, 2024); Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights, Wellcome Collection (2024-2025); O Quilombismo, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (2023); Liverpool Biennial (2023) and Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum at Duke University, 2023. Major commissions include The lineage of plants (2026), The New Art Gallery Walsall and Coventry University UK and From the ones who came before…Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter UK (2026). In 2024, Watkiss was a recipient of the Sloane Lab Fellowship. Her work is held in private and public collections including The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK; The British Museum, London UK; The Government Art Collection, London UK; Cartwright Hall Museum, Bradford UK; Lakeland Arts, Kendal, UK and Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham NC USA, Katrin Bellinger collection.

Dr Indie A. Choudhury is an art historian and curator. She is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art (Global Black Diasporas and Black Studies) at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her recent publications include contributions to Michaela Yearwood Dan: The Practice of Liberation (2026), Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (2025) and Hew Locke: Passages (2025). Recent curatorial projects include In Praise of Black Errantry, presented with Unit London at Venice Biennale, 2024. She is currently completing the first monograph dedicated to Frank Bowling’s White Paintings, a body of work spanning more than six decades of the artist’s career. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Yale Center for British Art, Stanford Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.