Class of 2021: Charlotte Searle

BA Fine Art, Falmouth University.

Charlotte Searle is a multidisciplinary artist who explores fictional multiplicities and knotty, entangled themes that refuse a definitive answer. She is interested in surreal domestic horror and the dissociated body concerning place and non-place. Exploiting ritual, rites of passage, the space between birth and death, pleasure and consumer culture, she harnesses the subconscious whilst inviting an unsettling awkwardness. Charlotte’s practice employs messy irreverent methods of work, cherishing mistake and humour. The works attempt to subsume you, using a nauseating saturation that vacillates with abject imagery.

Accompanying text to Velvet Tongue:

“I have vague memories like impressions on glass plates”, Patti Smith.

Our memories embossed
A faint impression on frosted glass, muddled, broken, and stuck back together with my tape
Each retelling slightly altered,
Each retelling of retelling amplified or diminished
Like tape, every rerecording, every glitch creating new memory
Rewritten and facilitated by my fiction

Retrograde amnesia, a transient memory
Whose is it to retell, whose authorship is lost?
document now becomes flimsy
Linear language of linear stories to export my PDF to all the clouds
When Dead, lamentation laid bare on fragmented form
Expelled from those who will sip from a simulation of pleasure
Simulacrum SimulaCum

Drunken pixels free to create new
My woven phallus oh how I will bow
Knitted morsels will submit to your infection
I will interrogate pleasure, I will lick it through screen

Embalmed then immortalised in the digital realm
Ready to be recoded for our collective death
A crypto lesion on my neural passage

My flickering formless entity
Transcend tomorrow’s today

charlottesearle9.wixsite.com/charlottesearle

Instagram: @char_searle

Degree Show: Falmouth Showcase online from 26 July 2021 showcase.falmouth.ac.uk/

Images:
Charlotte Searle, Velvet Tongue, film, performance, 2021.