Charlotte Haywood

Charlotte Haywood

Charlotte Haywood lives regionally in Northern NSW on Bundjalung Country. She is an experimental interdisciplinary artist that explores themes and practices from pop to the primordial. Colour often acting as catalyst.

She seeks cultural and linguistic nuances of the body and the landscape to decrypt and unfold multi-narratives. She creates works that thread disparate narratives of time, culture and place through the use of materiality, process, form and motif; from the botanical and historical to future nostalgia.

Experimentally trading between the tactile and the digital, form and ephemera, she works across mediums including: textiles, sculpture, installation, architecture, the moving image, theatre, landscape, community, emergent systems and ecologies.

Her practices and materials can vary from hybrid architectural forms to the ancient technology of tapestry weaving in a symbolic un-weaving and reweaving of interrogated histories and land management practices that seek parity of knowledge systems, gesture as language, synaesthesia, national community interdisciplinary-craft-geometry-scientific-environmental networks, and evolving multi-narrational video works.  Ultimately investigating alternate, ancient and emergent living systems. She looks to untie hierarchies in light of multiplicity, or the multi-narrative, an act of decolonising the self.

Her latest large scale and touring work GREEN ASYLUM exhibited at The Australian Design Centre (2017) NSW, Biennale of Australian Art (2018) Ballarat VIC, Logan Art Gallery (2019) QLD, Wangaratta Regional Gallery (2019) VIC and soon Caboolture Regional Gallery (2020) QLD and Maitland Regional Gallery (2021) NSW. The work was supported by The Australia Council for the Arts. It provided opportunity for an experimental work that looked at the Australian landscape, language, architecture, textiles and video. Including the creation of her evolving or “living” video work SHARING ACTION ii (2017-), whereby she has collaborated and presented over 25 Indigenous and migrant languages as hand gesture. The work was supported by Batchelor Institute’s Centre for Aboriginal Languages + Linguistics, NT and Melbourne University’s Research Unit for Indigenous Language, VIC.

Haywood has worked inter-culturally; interdisciplinary and collaboratively in remote Australia, Vanuatu, Thailand and Indonesia, having also completed residencies in India, Peru, Mexico and Thailand.

She has recently spent time with Mbabaram Elder and Senior Ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin at the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre, Australian Tropical Herbarium, James Cook University, Cairns for her works HERE + NOW (2020) for Brisbane Botanical Gardens and MNEMONIC VEGETABLES (2020) for Lismore Regional Gallery.

She is collected by the Museum of Applied Arts + Sciences, Sydney, the National Film + Sound Archive of Australia and ARTBANK. She has been awarded Australia Council grants for her projects- DIRTY DEEDS (2012), GREEN INFLUX (2015) and GREEN ASYLUM (2017). She has exhibited internationally and nationally, including: Fishers Ghost Art Prize (2014) NSW, Incinerator Art for Social Change Award (2015) VIC, Sculpture by the Sea (2008, 2019) NSW, Ne Na’ Contemporary Art Space (2015) Thailand, and Casa Lú (2020) Mexico City.

With one foot in the present and one in the past, she looks to the future for narratives, intersections and evolutions, holding symbol and language as crux.

charlottehaywood.com.au

Image: Green Asylum interior detail (2017). Image courtesy of the artist.