Living in Cornwall and travelling back every year to India, where I was born, means I exist between two continents, with both cultures deeply rooted inside me. The colour & chaos of the east against a more sedate, quiet west is a balancing act in my work that I play with. I attempt to unite east with west, utilising, and at times bending, the strict rules of pottery, merging image, colour and spontaneity with structure and form.
I first touched clay in the late 1970's and early 80's. On discovering porcelain, I was seduced by its translucency and fine quality: inspired to mimic the preciousness of nature, making small pots & jewelry using lustrous glazes to enhance the beauty & delicacy of the porcelain.
Today I prefer to work with earthenware to create handmade ceramics. Using impact of colour while exploring forms and shape usually found in nature and the everyday. I seek to make the ordinary into something extraordinary, allowing my ideas to flow and fly into form.
"It was the weekend of Charmaine’s degree show at the then Falmouth School of Art. I found myself driving to Falmouth with the late David Brown, curator of Tate Gallery. Between us we bought practically all of Charmaine’s work. I don’t know what happened to David’s pieces after he died (although I wish I did), but the pieces I acquired then, and along the years that followed, have been significant in my life ever since. For me, they are a celebration of the beauty and joy of the everyday. To place tangerines in an ultramarine bowl swirling with gold and fuchsia motifs; to draw a pencil from a rose vase trimmed with mauve, a tiny bird perching on the lip; to pour tea out of a pot that so wittily pretends to be a cactus; to, on a rainy silver-grey day, gaze upon the rotund little jug on the mantelpiece, indigo and yellow singing in the gloom; these are the small acts that lift the spirits, feed the eyes, remind me that domesticity is all about love and generosity, as these small vessels are."
Mercedes Kemp,
Senior Lecturer, Fine Art
Falmouth University and
Associate Director of WildWorks