Mixed media artist Charlie Lee started this series of doodles and drawings during lockdown. A former student of the Edinburgh College of Art, doodling became her way to avoid >stay home< walls and piles of washing up, allowing her to journey on paper to unplanned and unknown places. Her daily doodles became as ritualistic as her daily walks and the repetitive loop of feeding, bathing and bedding her children. She soon created a curious trail of silky touch, ultra-bright, best-selling multi-functional eco office paper around the house, adorned with drawings and snatches of thought.
While the pandemic is starting to fade from memory, the repercussions for Charlie have endured in a butterfly effect of wings being clipped and freedom denied. Of being reconditioned and controlled. These works document her journey unfurling in abstract lines and whimsical, bulbous shapes, boxy bouquets and popping candy forms. A chaotic, subconscious hopscotch that is also questing for something concrete, balanced and harmonious. Both born out of isolation and coming out of isolation, learning to connect again.
That tension between being out in the world and retreating still underpins Charlie’s work today, overwhelmed as so many of us have been by the humanitarian tragedies unfolding in the world, driving us once more to shut down and retreat.
Charlie is currently working on exploring these themes further, leaping from pencil and paper into paint and canvas with a spring palette of turmeric hues, greens and blues.
