Childhood Dreams

Stepping into Charlotte Mei’s studio is like opening up a scrapbook filled with all her passions and experiences. In one corner, there’s a Tolkien quiz book, a trolley full of paints and a sewing machine. In another, a coffee machine and a McDonald’s toy clock — an old birthday gift from a friend. Half-finished sculptures and metal objects litter a workbench, while a 40-page Lord of the Rings magazine she published with her friend, Chris Harnan, is tucked away on a bookshelf. Her influences are scattered everywhere.

Currently the space is dominated by a towering series of paintings (the largest of which is three metres long) that she’s working on for Like A Melody: Myths, Memories, and Fantasy, her debut exhibition at NOW Gallery. Propped up against the walls, the pieces envelop us like a comforting blanket, their dreamy, pastel-tinted swathes of colour illuminated by the intermittent and unreliable March sun.

These works are Charlotte’s biggest to date – she had to get the canvases custom made – and they’re also the first she’s produced in over a year. Prior to this hiatus, the London-based artist was busy producing fanfiction, comics, serene landscape paintings, charming (often wobbly) ceramics and working with countless global clients like Sony Music, Hermès and Nike. But “things went a bit topsy-turvy,” she says, before quietly explaining how she lost a few cherished people in her life and had to abandon her previous studio.

For the first time in her working life she made nothing, which didn’t sit well with someone usually so prolific. Then out of nowhere, an email appeared from NOW Gallery proposing a solo show. So she rented a new studio in Camberwell, which boasts scenic views and plenty of space to wrangle giant canvases, and got to work. It felt like “divine timing,” she says, “the perfect thing to yank me out of my stupor. Having this studio to work in has really helped me work through that period of my life and I feel like I want to make art again.”

Growing up near Nottingham, Charlotte describes her younger self as a “Beanie Baby kid” with an enormous collection of stuffed toys. One of her earliest memories is of her mum taking her on a day trip to Sherwood Forest. “I remember going to the gift shop at the end and begging my mum to get me the bow, arrow and hat to be like Robin Hood,” she recalls. Her mother agreed, and young Charlotte was instantly transformed into the courageous outlaw — in her mind at least. “Having props to make yourself feel like the character in a story is something that has stayed with me ever since.”

Whether dreaming idly in Sherwood Forest or reading fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings, these moments of escapism provide fuel for Charlotte’s work, which in turn create a sense of escapism for the viewer. For her, nestling into a book, cartoon or comic, or dressing up as Robin Hood, provides cathartic release in difficult times.

When she was younger, she would often sit in front of the TV with her sister after school, drawing the characters from cartoons like Dragon Ball Z or Pokémon. “I would say watching cartoons is probably what got me into drawing,” she says. “My early years were a little bit challenging at times due to family circumstances, and I recall many occasions where I would just get completely lost in a fantasy novel. There's this sense of purpose and creativity in the narratives.”

For the new body of work that forms Like A Melody, we’re seeing an amalgamation of all Charlotte’s past experiences merged into one, from her earliest cartoon drawings and Lord of the Rings fan art to all of the literary and artistic influences she’s enjoyed over the years. The largest work on show is directly inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies series, which she saw at a gallery in Japan. The canvases engulfed the wall and immersed her directly into the scene, as if she was right there in the middle of the pond splashing in the soothing tones. She hopes the viewer will experience the same feeling while standing in front of her own work.

Meanwhile, the smaller paintings and objects — like a Sailor Moon-inspired sword, armoured bikini and metal music box, created with her metalworker friend Fred Thompson — are hidden around the gallery, encased in vitrines on plinths to appear like artefacts from a fantastical world. An unmissable three-metre tall giant plushie has been designed to create a sense of comfort and strangeness, and visitors are encouraged to touch it, or lie down on it while taking in the rest of the show. All of these elements are taken from Charlotte’s own dreamy fantasy, where girliness, sweetness and childhood memories prevail. “I wanted to create a world that was inspired by the fantasy that I grew up on, like Lord of the Rings, but that also has a femininity to it. There are hardly any women in these stories,” she explains.

Despite her early influences, it took a long time for Charlotte to land in the art world. In fact, she wasn’t aware that art could be a vocation. She’d heard of the masters like Picasso and Van Gogh, but thought they and their profession belonged to the past. “I didn’t realise you could still be one,” she says.

Raised by a single mum who moved to the UK at a young age, Charlotte says her mother supported her creativity, but always wanted her daughters to find a stable, “adult job”, so Charlotte thought she might study politics or end up working for the council. That was until her art teacher encouraged her to take an art foundation year at Bristol School of Art, where her storytelling and illustration talents really started to bloom.

When it came to applying for universities, Charlotte experienced another bump in the road. During an interview at Bristol, a tutor asked what illustration meant to her, to which she replied that she saw it as a form of narrative storytelling. He disagreed outright, saying that illustration was purely a commercial tool and that she “shouldn’t bother” attending her scheduled interviews for the University of Brighton or Camberwell College of Arts. They shared his views, he said, and would be unlikely to admit her. “His word was gospel,” she says, and so she “didn’t go to my interviews in Brighton or Camberwell, because it completely knocked my confidence.”

Months later she was invited to a second round of interviews at Camberwell and a friend persuaded her that she really ought to go. “I found out the same day that I got the place,” she says. “If I hadn’t joined the course, things would have been totally different.”

Her closed-minded Bristol tutor was wrong. Camberwell is known for its diverse and open-minded approach to illustration, particularly when it comes to taking illustrative practice “off-piste” or toying with different media. During her studies, Charlotte started experimenting with textiles and pottery, which formed the majority of her Grayson Perry-inspired final major project. In that respect, Charlotte is not a stereotypical illustrator, and her practice is hard to define. Whether it’s a painting, comic, ceramic, animation or piece of clothing, there’s a poetic, colourful and spirited undercurrent that runs throughout all of her work. “It’s all about the process, tactility and the way that I as a human interact with these materials.”

Charlotte does not sketch, instead preferring to build each work with the colour palette, which guides the piece emotionally depending on how she’s feeling that day. Next, she moves onto her character design, which tends to be derived from her bank of memories – like the characters from the cartoons, manga or fantasy films she watched as a kid. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have a sample pack of ideas that I want to develop or think about,” she says. 

Rather than working systematically, Charlotte prefers to have a few paintings on the go at any one time. This stops her from getting too precious about what she’s putting down on the canvas and gives her the chance to revisit ideas and compositions over several days before landing on the final form. “I’m the kind of person that doesn’t ever finish,” she admits. The works in progress that litter her studio are testament to this trait.

Since long before graduation, Charlotte‘s work has been peppered with sweet animals (mostly dogs), tottering through the lush greenery of nearby Peckham Rye Park, cheerful characters happily drowning in a whirlpool of colour, and roses swaying blithely against a backdrop of textural brush strokes. But this year, there's been a new development in the way she applies herself to her practice, and the results are more emotionally raw, injecting melancholy and sadness into a world that was once rose-tinted. “The more artworks I make, the more things are uncovered,” she says. “I’m almost trying to unearth something that’s inside me to make it visible.”

After some time away from her practice, Charlotte has seized the opportunity to dig into her innermost self and pluck out her rawest emotions. It’s been a cathartic, full-circle moment, and Like A Melody represents a homecoming of sorts, not to a place, but to a way of being. “It’s quite a revealing thing to do to speak from your heart, but if I was going to make a body of work that feels really honest, it has to go back to the references and passions that I've had since childhood,” Charlotte says. “My experiences over the past year have compelled me to find an honesty in what I do and be able to express what it is to be on Earth — to have sadness, melancholy and rage but also happiness, hope, adventure and love. I’ve tried to combine all those things into something that feels real for me.” Charlotte's exhibition is on at NOW Gallery until the 2nd June. Scan the QR code to read the full version of this article online.

Images by Charles Emerson