Charlotte Kell; artist & poet
Hyfler/Rosner
22 August 2006
David Buckman
Charlotte Mary Kell, artist, poet and teacher: born
Rockbourne, Hampshire 3 October 1944; died London 9 July
2006.
Her work:
http://www.geocities.jp/nichieitanka/charlotte.html
Charlotte Kell was a singular personality, with a fountain
of ideas which found expression in a stream of visual and
written work. Like many artists who do not conform to an
accepted norm, she did not achieve much commercial success.
But, by the time of her comparatively early death, Kell had
contributed to numerous group exhibitions, and had around a
dozen solo shows and a string of publications to her credit.
Kell was born in Rockbourne, Hampshire, in 1944, where her
mother, Bobby, was living during the Second World War.
Charlotte was one of four daughters, her father, John, a
lawyer, and her grandfather General Sir Vernon Kell, the
founder of MI5. "Charlotte was a real free spirit," says her
sister Virginia:
Whatever she did she was fully supported in it, but ours was
not an artistic family. We didn't always understand what she
was doing, which was quite difficult for her.
At the beginning of the 1970s Kell attended the University
of California, Berkeley. She studied a range of two- and
three-dimensional art disciplines and photography. On return
to England her studies continued through the 1980s and into
the 1990s, at London University, North London and Oxford
Polytechnics, Froebel College and the Roehampton Institute.
As well as graduating with honours in English literature and
Classics in translation, she studied early childhood
education and qualified to teach at secondary level and
English as a foreign language.
Kell learned much about the practice of art and its history
from Morris - known as Charlie - Chackas, a Marxist and
portrait and still-life painter, who lived in his eccentric
hut-inside-a-hut in Oxford. For 45 years until his death in
2000, she absorbed valuable lessons in technique and learned
of the diverse artists who had influenced him. When in 2002
Duncan Campbell's Kensington gallery put on a studio sale of
Chackas's work, Kell wrote a sympathetic catalogue
introduction.
Alongside her studies and exhibiting, Kell was busy as a
freelance portrait photographer, art teacher and participant
in community art and workshops. She also taught creative
writing and took part in poetry readings and workshops
organised by the Poetry Society.
During the 1980s, Kell began to publish poetry, for adults
and children, through Stylus Publicatations and, more often,
with Outposts Publications, the catholic imprint overseen by
Howard Sergeant. Among her later Outposts volumes were The
All-night Café Poems (Dance of Fire) Books 1 and 2, both
appearing in 2002. In an introduction to these she explained
the influence of Homeric and oral poetry on her work, her
own poems having been "difficult to write because I'm as
interested in the sound (word music) as I am in the
content". She hoped this was "thought-provoking, spiritually
uplifting and, at times, just fun".
In 2002, Outposts also published Collages, Art Boxes and
Sculpture, a book on Kell's visual work by Max Wykes-Joyce,
former art critic of the International Herald Tribune. Kell
had participated in a series of boxed art exhibitions
organised by the boxes enthusiast Jane England, of England &
Co. As is often the case with boxed art, Kell's
constructions were "open to many readings", as too is the
case with much of her two-dimensional work.
The writer Nigel Foxell saw Kell's artwork develop from the
mid-1970s. Before he knew her there had been a notable
series of "remarkable heads, semi- abstract, fuzzy-edged and
well over life-size. They had a haunting quality." She was
by this time working on her boxes and collages. She called
her assemblages "icons of our age", referring to "ancient,
half-forgotten gods and worlds".
Graffiti, posters and ephemera informed her collages, made
from paper "whose life is useful one minute, and detritus
the next". Foxell sees the boxes, which can be white, not
entirely white and sometimes brightly coloured "as being
collages in three dimensions instead of two, with a slightly
surrealist quality, and a beauty, too".
For the last decade or so Kell was engaged on a series of
carvings. For those who saw her work she anticipated that
what she created will "hopefully enrich your life in some
small way. I don't think any artist can hope for more than
this."