Charlotte Cooper

Monotype lithographic wall hanging with monotype lined calico coat.

Charlotte Cooper is a UK based artist who studied at Camberwell College of Art before beginning her MA at The Royal College of Art.

Charlotte’s practice is concerned with our understanding of how the mind develops from the beginning of life. She is intrigued by the near inaccessibility of these early aspects of ourselves and where they might be articulated in the convergence between art and psychoanalysis. She considers whether these ungraspable elements of our early selves are held within and communicated through art’s affective dimension. She works using a range of printing techniques, in particular, the medium of monotype printing.

While studying for her MA she attained 'Distinction' in her dissertation entitled ' After Memory - The Ghost Print'. The discourse in this body of writing addressed the connections between artist, artwork and viewer and how relations move between these positions. It looked at the affective experience in art and the choices artists have made in relation to how affect is modulated within works from different art movements. She considers whether art can speak of these earliest memories and experiences?

Charlotte has recently exhibited work in exhibitions including :

‘Bainbridge Open 2023’ The Handbag Factory, London. June 2023

‘International Women’s Day Exhibition’ God’s House Tower, Southampton. April 2023

‘Twofold’, Southwark Park Galleries, London. March 2023

Charlotte is due to begin a residency at The Tavistock Institute at the end of 2023.

Monotype lithographic double sided print on Japanese paper.

An image flickers and jumps like a damaged film reel.

A moment repeats, stuttering and archaic.

Its form is the acid swirling in a stomach cavity,

The altered state of the world around when nothing has materially changed.

It is trapped forever on a screen partially viewed in the periphery,

but when I turn to face it directly it’s only static noise.

It holds me just out of reach but torturously close.

This border place is a passage.

It reaches back generations,

and waits for those who are yet to touch the earth.

The near inaccessibility of knowing and recounting our earliest experiences and memory has taken up my thoughts for some time. I reflect on where the vestiges of our ancient selves might collect, too ill defined to be experienced again, but there as a faltering echo in an internal universe. This remote unreachability haunts us. Its manifestations in behaviour and perception won’t allow us to live with it or be rid of it. I consider whether art’s affective dimension could speak of this ancient part of ourselves, seemingly forgotten but forever holding sway.

I think about these early times before awareness and subjectivity being only really representable as loss. Through our attempts to recoup this loss of the memory of our past, prior to awareness, to gaze again at our early life, we push it further from our grasp. And this happens over and over again, so it is only perceptible as loss. The loss becomes a strange representation of this early time before cognisance, and gives it form which allows us to see its importance in the present.

Maurice Blanchot writes:

‘What haunts is the inaccessible, which one cannot rid oneself of, what one does not find and what, because of that, does not allow one to avoid it. The ungraspable is what one does not escape.’

I question whether the decisions I make as an artist and the affective experience in the viewer that is filtered through personal subjectivity does have a deep connection to the archaic parts of ourselves. If loss is the representation of the early self, I see the art object as the vessel that holds and disseminates it.

The imprint of the image fades,

and the residue it has left can be wiped away.

It sinks back through silt layers that close over it.

Resting beneath.

Neither retrievable nor disposable.

Until next time.