Born Sydney, Australia
LIVES Bundjalung COUNTRY, NORTHERN NSW, Australia

About

Charlotte Haywood lives regionally in Northern NSW on Bundjalung Country. She is an experimental interdisciplinary artist working across the senses. She seeks cultural and linguistic nuances of the body and ecologies to decrypt and unfold multi-narratives; unearthing emergent narratives of coexistence. She has cultivated a highly collaborative and process-driven practice that is dedicated to earth wise intelligence and the self organising nature of life.

Her practice is a sensory allegory - witnessing, unravelling, weaving and remembering.  It is a direct activism of materiality and collaboration. By mimicking and mirroring nature’s strategies, from mutualism to collaboration, inhabiting ecology without ownership, her work embodies a tender activism in a decaying modern world.

She looks to untie hierarchies in light of biodiversity. Threading disparate narratives of time, culture and place through the use of materiality, process, form and motif. From the botanical and historical to future nostalgia. She is an everyway-weaver. Experimentally trading between the tactile and the digital, form and ephemera- working across: textiles, sculpture, installation, public art, experimental architecture, film, theatre, sound, food, linguistics, community and ecologies.

Her performative practices and embodied materials can vary from hybrid architectural forms to the ancient technology of tapestry weaving in a symbolic un-weaving and reweaving of interrogated histories and land management practices, cultural botany, ecological restoration, gesture as language, synaesthesia, national community interdisciplinary-craft-geometry-science-environment networks, community cookbooks, creative disaster recovery, data as flavour and evolving multi-narrational video works.

She is committed to seeking new depths of site-specific response, creative collaboration and community engagements. She has worked in remote and regional Australia, Vanuatu, Thailand, India, Peru, Japan and Mexico.

Her large scale touring work GREEN ASYLUM, supported by The Australia Council for the Arts, exhibited at The Australian Design Centre (2017) NSW, Biennale of Australian Art (2018) Ballarat VIC, Logan Art Gallery (2019) QLD, Wangaratta Regional Gallery (2019) VIC, Caboolture Regional Art Gallery (2021) QLD and has been acquired by Tamworth Regional Gallery NSW (2023). It provided opportunity for an experimental work that looked at the Australian landscape, language, architecture, textiles and video. Including the creation of the evolving or “living” video work SHARING ACTION ii (2017- ), with April Pengart Campbell from Ti Tree Community, NT. Presenting over 25 Indigenous and migrant languages as hand gesture. The work was supported by Batchelor Institute’s Centre for Aboriginal Languages + Linguistics, NT and Melbourne University’s Research Unit for Indigenous Language, VIC.

Since 2018, she has been in counsel with Mbabaram Custodian and Senior Ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin at the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre (TIEC), Australian Tropical Herbarium, James Cook University, Cairns for her projects MNEMONIC VEGETABLES (2020) presented at Lismore Regional Gallery, NSW, bringing together interdisciplinary plant practitioners, Knowledge Holders and vocalists, and commissioned interactive public work HERE + NOW (2021) for Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, QLD. Which platformed the importance and authority of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). This project also brought attention to the significance of the study of phenology or biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal variations and climate change through interviewing Phenologist Marie Keatley, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Whilst incorporating audience participation through a citizen science activation via the Climate Change App.

She is collected by the Museum of Applied Arts + Sciences, Sydney, the National Film + Sound Archive of Australia, Tamworth Regional Gallery, Broken Hill Art Gallery and ARTBANK. She has been awarded Australia Council grants for her projects- MNEMONIC VEGETABLES (2020), GREEN ASYLUM (2017), GREEN INFLUX (2015) and DIRTY DEEDS (2012).
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: ARTSPACE (2024) NSW, The Lock-Up (2024) NSW, Northsite Contemporary Arts (2023) Cairns, Outerspace (2023) QLD, Caloundra Regional Gallery (2022), National Still Life Prize (2021) NSW, Tweed Regional Gallery (2021), Caboolture Regional Gallery (2021), ARTISAN (2021), Lismore Regional Gallery (2024, 2020), Logan Art Gallery (2019), Wangaratta Regional Gallery (2019), Australian Design Centre (2017) Fishers Ghost Art Prize (2014), Incinerator Art for Social Change Award (2015) VIC, Sculpture by the Sea (2008, 2019) NSW, Ne Na’ Contemporary Art Space (2015) Thailand, Casa Lú (2020) Mexico City, Ma’Umi Projects (2023) Japan.

She has worked within film and television on such productions as Jim Henson’s FARSCAPE (2001-2003), feature films THE RAGE IN PLACID LAKE (2002), THE NIGHT WE CALLED IT A DAY (2003), LITTLE FISH (2004), SALVATION (2006), AUSTRALIA (2007), PRIME MOVER (2008), MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2010) and most recently the Sinem Saban’s documentary LUKU NGÄRRA: The Law of the Land (2022).

Her most recent Dance/Theatre productions include Production and Costume design for Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) WILDKSIN(2024), LOVE FOR ONE NIGHT (2022), INTO THE FOREST (2021-2022), + WILDKSKIN (2018) by Julian Louis, DJURRA by Kirk Page, THE UNDERLIBRARY OF UNOFFICIAL HISTORIES (2021-22) and JOURNEY TO AN UNNAMED WORLD (2021) by Valley Lipcer.

In 2020 she was a lead artist working on a year long site specific community engaged creative response for Rappville, NSW, a village heavily effected by the 2019 bushfires. For RAPPVILLE CREATIVE with Arts Northern Rivers, Richmond Valley Council and CREATE NSW. She worked with environmental scientist Michelle Chapman, chef Wal Foster, musician Sue Simpson and Ngulingah Nursery for a project of ecological restoration, community cookbook with illustrative native plant uses, site specific ice cream and accompanying score.

She was artist in residence at The Lock-Up with the iterative exhibition MNEMONIC VEGETABLES; PROTEST + REVERENCE in late-February 2024. She was shortlisted fort the 2024 CREATE NSW + ARTSPACE Visual Arts Fellowship (VAFE), awarded the 2024 Open Cut Commission at the Broken Hill Art Gallery and the 2024 Joyce Spencer Textiles Fellowship for her project Same Time/Same Place (COEXISTENCE); a MULTISPECIES opera of the senses and has been shortlisted for the 2025 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award.

(Image: Lisa Sorgini)