Practice in Place - Charlie Duck
Charlie Duck shares his experience of living and working as an artist in Cornwall.
Tell us about you and your practice
I’m an artist originally from the South East but currently based in Cornwall. I studied at Brighton, the RCA and finally at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, as a guest student of Amy Sillman and Monika Baer in the painting class.
I work with a range of processes and materials to explore possibilities within drawing and painting. I like how each one can lead me to think differently, generating new possibilities within making and I enjoy the feeling of being restless, shifting between different methodologies and modes of being.
My studio is a really important place, for testing and playing, hopefully creating a space where I can work without self-consciousness, though equally vital is taking the work out of the studio – bringing it together through editing and revision such as when making exhibitions for instance.
Alongside my practice I also work as a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University, where I’ve worked since 2019. Though higher education is a complex landscape, I love working with students, and alongside making art, teaching feels like the greatest job.
What are the great art spaces and organisations you love to visit?
Hweg in Penzance is doing something quite distinct, Joe has a clear eye and has put together a compelling program of exhibitions that feels considered and coherent despite the formal and conceptual differences between each show.
I have a studio at CAST - alongside its community of other studio holders and excellent café, one of the best things about it is the exhibitions that take place in its purpose built black-box space. The program is eclectic but consistently well curated and I have found myself (amongst other feelings) surprised, moved and inspired by the artist films I have seen there, which recently has included work by Charlie Prodger, John Smith, Ane Hjort Guttu, Grace Ndiritu and Marcus Coates among others. CAST also has a series of artist choice screenings, talks and other events and workshops which bring together interesting people and I’ve found having my studio there has been a great way to access the arts community across Cornwall and beyond.
There are many other spaces in the south-west from big institutions to esoteric collections housed in basements, all of which are nice things to uncover as the months roll by. A couple of vaguely recent highlights of larger exhibitions I’ve enjoyed include Ingrid Pollard, Vija Celmins and J.M.W Turner at The Box, Ithell Colquhoun at the Tate and Emma Talbot at Arnolfini, though I tend to spend much more time visiting smaller shows than the heavy hitter retrospectives.
What resources or facilities are there that you (can) access?
In my role at Falmouth University I find the daily exchanges that I have with both colleagues and students so often inspiring and unexpected and they are something that I really cherish. The opportunity to support students whilst also learning from them is a privilege I am eternally grateful for, especially having spent the best part of a decade working on building sites across Hastings prior to segueing into working in higher education. Not that there’s anything wrong with building of course, but intellectually it’s not always as stimulating as a crit, tutorial or seminar can be.
I’ve been obsessed with cycling for as long as I can remember – from cycling around the garden as a child to downhill mountain biking as a teenager. Around 20 I became much more focused on road cycling and in the two decades since, haven’t really looked back. I love cycling around Cornwall, it’s extremely hilly, rains all the time, is windier than anything and some of the roads are truly terrible: on paper it sounds like an awful environment for cycling but somehow it all just adds to it. One of my favourite things about living here is how easily I can be somewhere extremely remote within a few minutes of leaving my home and how it opens up the county, whether riding on or off road. It always leads somewhere unexpected and I find the time I spend on the bike is just as valuable as the time I spend in the studio. All of which is a bit of a longwinded way of saying Cornwall itself is a great resource. I don’t think I ever respond directly to it as a place in my work, and I’m not sure I ever will but invariably it’s informing my work in all sorts of seen and unseen ways.
Cheerlead for your peers! - Who would you like to shout loudly about?
This is almost an impossible question to answer as I am fortunate enough to count many excellent artists, curators and writers amongst my peers, working in all different parts of the world!
From my time in Germany I would big up my friends Aileen Murphy and Babette Semmer who I consider to be extraordinary painters and much more importantly, extraordinary people.
Laura Bygrave is a painter I admired for a long time and I am now lucky enough to consider a friend. We will be spending a month working together as recipients of the Freeland’s Foundation Two Together programme at Porthmeor studios later this year – something I can’t wait for. Laura is part of a small cluster of idiosyncratic and rigorous painters that I’ve known since about 2015 when I had a studio for a few months at Outpost in Norfolk - Anna Brass, Paul Fenner and Alex Crocker, each of whom I think is doing something really singular in terms of testing what painting can be.
It would be wholly remiss to not give my two dear friends Hannah Waldron and Hugh Frost a hefty doff of the cap – they have been so kind and generous in so many ways to me over the years, and are largely if not solely responsible for me even being in Cornwall in the first place. They are both extremely dedicated artists committed to their practices, which though completely different from one another, have in common a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of process and material.
Some other friends that also happen to make brilliant art are Nina Royle, Leah Stewart, Rosanna Martin, Simon Bayliss, Ben Sanderson, Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Lissette Jimenez Diaz, Dickon Drury, Dan Howard-Birt and Christopher Green.
I mentioned daily exchanges with colleagues above, and amongst others would bang a particularly loud drum for Bronwen Buckeridge, Lucy Willow, Maria Christoforidou, Kate Fahey and Jonty Lees.
Lastly, I would give a huge shout to Clay Trap, which is a community ceramics studio run by my partner Sarah Fassnidge and Bridie Maddocks that, alongside regular membership and open access sessions, do lots of interesting projects with local schools, for example a recent project where children worked with locally dug gabbroic clay to explore Cornwall's ancient history of ceramic production.
Where do you make your work?
As mentioned above, I have a studio at CAST which is where I work usually, though since having a baby this summer, I have found myself working at home more, making small drawings and paintings on paper in the last moments just before bed. They are a small daily action that have become a gentle record of the passing of time, made without expectation or aim but merely about connecting line, form, colour, memory and reflection.
My current studio is very small though mercifully warm. When I first moved in I immediately built a mezzanine to store (or more accurately hide) all my old work on. I was initially worried the weight would bring the ceiling down but given it’s now been several years since I built it, I’m hopeful that if it was going to happen, it would have happened by now!
It’s a very simple set-up. I have two large tables on wheels that I make my large flat ceramic works on. Once the work becomes leather-hard, I cut the big slab into smaller more manageable sections which I then transfer to a series of shelves to dry very slowly over three or four months wrapped under plastic. Once dry, I take the works downstairs to Clay Trap, and use their kilns to bisque fire the work. It all then gets carted back upstairs where I normally deliberate for a few months, before finally biting the bullet, digging out all of the raw materials I use to make my glazes and then I begrudgingly glaze it, wishing it was a quicker and simpler process. Once this is done, I once more traipse downstairs to Clay Trap to second fire it all, hoping it comes out vaguely like what I was hoping for.
That all sounds rather pedestrian, but in, around and amongst this I spend a lot of time doing and making other things – paintings, drawings, prints, writing and even somewhat unexpectedly taking some videos recently.
What opportunities are there for artists in your area?
There are a surprising number of opportunities I think down here. The South West Showcase is something that a number of friends have done in the past, and they each seem to have found it a transformative experience. Every few years there is the Cornwall Workshop – I was fortunate enough to participate in the 2024 edition with Mike Nelson and a fantastic group of artists, curators and writers. Though it is only a week, I found the experience absolutely extraordinary and the cohort I was part of have become firm friends, even initiating a second meeting of the crew the following winter.
There are various online resources - VASW obviously comes to mind (!) - an invaluable database of opportunities, resources, references and advice that covers a much bigger area across the entire south-west. A fairly new resource is CK Associates which offers membership and promotes opportunities for artists at all different stages of their careers. Both resources save a lot of time and labour for artists by aggregating these into organised mailouts – which are well worth signing up to.
What or who helps you maintain your practice?
My partner, in ways that are too multi-faceted, complex and personal to ever put into words.
Our son.
Friends and family.
My bicycle(s).
The belief that no matter how bleak the world can seem and how impotent hours in the studio can feel against complex geopolitics and structural inequalities that permeate both local and global landscapes, art is inextricably part of what it is to be alive and in ways big and small can change the world for others as well as for ourselves.
What else would you love VASW's audiences to know about where you live and work as an artist?
I have found living and working in Cornwall an endlessly exciting and rewarding experience – it has been welcoming in ways I would never have imagined and the community in and around the art scene here is supportive and genuine. There are so many people really committed to what they do and finding ways to do what they do in their own way. It’s an inspiring place to be.
How can people find out more about your work?
Come to my studio if they’re ever at CAST!
And/or look online here -
