Charlotte Ashman Artist & Printmaker

Charlotte lives and works from a pair of 1935 narrowboats on the waterways of the UK. She grew up in the screen printing industry and has always gravitated towards art as her occupation, she has worked with Sculpture, Painting, Photography and has been heavily involved in community arts during her career. She returned to working with print in 2017 teaching herself  Linocut printmaking after working with Intaglio at University and Screen Printing in Industry.

Living and working on the water has a huge influence in Charlotte's work. Inspiration taken from her everyday life helps to portray a visual narrative of what life is like aboard throughout the seasons. The Canals in Britain are part of the Nation's Transport Heritage. The prints that Charlotte makes, create links to people of the past that can be found everywhere on the waterways today, their activity worn into the very fabric of the canal system. 

Stories of lives lived in the present day on the water are woven with to those people of the past. There is a practical reason for the placement of every structure on the network. The design of the boats and methods of living and boating on these vessels, all stem from the early boaters' knowledge and innovation. Boats are passed from person to person and Charlotte feels that the boats symbolise a thread between those lives lived aboard who all experience the same things through different times while also having their own unique perspectives.

Working with print also has this 'thread' that connects the medium to the way life is lived on water. The process goes through transformations between two and three dimensions as the printing plate is cut and subsequently printed. This liminality emerges in the life of the boater. Life is not lived in one place but between places, moving from village to village, never a resident but never a stranger either. It is the transition that Charlotte enjoys, stories evolving and changing. Like the water, like the material and like the audience and narrator. Somewhere an image is remembered from this journey and that is what becomes a print.