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 sacred knowledge African-descendent women have of healing practices and their relationships to plants and nature. 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. The sculpture is a bust of a woman captured in a moment of serenity. Her high forehead is framed by thick kanerows – tight braids laid in continuous raised rows along the scalp – starting from a centre parting. The cloak is made of brass. She wears a garment made of woven raffia that bursts into a bushy skirt.
I use materials and techniques that connect to traditions of making on the African continent. Historically, lots of women in the diaspora have used craft to make things to earn extra money to survive. This is still happening in the present day as well. Next to the sculpture are two glass bottles. One contains a ‘cerasee’ tincture made from a plant (Momordica charantia), which is used to detoxify the body. The other bottle contains lemon balm (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. In Britain, we have only scratched the surface in talking about the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The title of the sculpture, ‘Still Waters’, alludes to the phrase “still waters run deep”. 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. Nowadays people are still crossing oceans, risking their lives.
On each side of the sculpture are portrait drawings of women from my ‘Plant Warrior’ series, African-descendent women preserving and holding sacred knowledge of medicinal plants. These women have the same face but reflect a multitude of imagined ancestors. All of the women have elaborate kanerow hairstyles and wear a neckpiece embellished with the fruits or seeds of a specific plant: delicate yellow flowers of the shea plant. Bushy stalks of rice. The plump red peppery Aframomum melegueta seeds were 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. They 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. This resembles the poses in old 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. The large drawing is called ‘The Matriarch I’; three women are posed together in a more relaxed style. One woman has a sage plant hanging around her neck. I’ve drawn the women in pencil, but the plants they carry are in watercolour. Sometimes I incorporate other materials such as coffee, or Reckitt’s Blue – an ultramarine-blue pigment that is used to whiten clothes during washing. At the bottom of the picture is a bell jar of green manchineel apples and a “do not touch” sign.
Many of the plants in my drawings are used for healing, but some, like this apple, were used as poison for liberation.