Charlotte Mei

0:04[Applause]

0:13my name is Charlotte and I am an illustrator and artist and I make ceramics and I'll just show you a little bit of what I I do up till now and what I'm interested in so firstly color is really important in my work and how color can evoke feelings and tell a story in themselves shape composition ♪

0:48real like looking at things in real life and painting from from real things and also depicting the abstract and how you can you can show feelings through food shapes and composition gesture the act of making being evident in the outcome I'm interested in history and how stories are told through objects and images I'm always going some museums and doing drawings and yeah it's one of my biggest influences and actually the practice of drawing in itself you know is using process as as a means to explore your reality so I work as an illustrator and day to day I do sort of commercial stuff for brands editorial musicians ads and things like that.

1:56And I started off as a well I studied illustration at Camberwell and got really into painting and also ceramics I spent my evenings in the ceramics department downstairs making stuff and that working with clay really helped me discover a natural way of working which is led by process and informed by mistakes and things that you don't expect when you're working and yeah.

2:30So I guess I've been working freelance for about six years and yeah it's been it's been a journey and one which I started off by having to basically leaving uni and I went on the dot all the next day and I just thought okay how am I gonna make this work like I wanted to be a artist so much.

3:06And in the end I took out a loan for ten thousand pounds and I I just I just worked and worked and worked and spent the money to buy a kiln and all the equipment I needed to to make my ceramics and a studio and eventually the you know the work started coming I was self-directing my own projects and stuff like that yeah and now I'm working for all sorts of people this was for glasses brand and as like a still-life kind of thing I do basically I can use the way that I work in my painting and my gestural work and can apply it to sort of different uses so some more recent work with this well obviously it's but it's a new year of the dog and it's for a perfume Agatha and I also made a animation.

4:19This is just a little clip of it and editorial as this recent one for vice this is for Ramona the suitcase is brand and it's a little suitcase and this is also for my wear and I've been working with musicians a lot I did a big project this year with some Australian musicians called cosmos midnight and I did their artwork for their singles and for their album and also some moving visual stuff for their live shows and yeah and I've been lucky enough this year to travel a little bit. And I did a show in Hong Kong with some of my artist friends we who worked together since uni and we we did a show for Chinese New Year of the dog and his some of the doggie work and where we were out there we got really into karaoke that's me and Saladin singing and so I really had karaoke on the brain when I returned home.

6:06And I started working on a book of of lyrics of my favorite karaoke video karaoke songs and I so I had like lists on my phone of like the best karaoke songs and I was I was so into it. And I started my thoughts started going back to like Smash Hits magazine which had like the the lists of all the lyrics in and that you could read the magazine I don't know if anyone else remembers this but you'd like buy the magazine and you could read the lyrics and sing along to the TV I really loved doing that.

6:43So I decided to make my own version. And this is of course Puff Daddy this is no doubt we're in Japan and we started learning the lyrics to this song called I want to eat ramen seal actually I've posted this and seal saw it and he said that's nice ♪

7:21that was a highlight of my career actually. And it was really good to just do something fun and something that was inspired by the things that I've enjoyed growing up. And I got to look at lots of videos and like interviews and stuff of all my favorite pop stars so yeah that I made this magazine to launch at El Cap this year yeah it was super fun this is tattoo. And so yeah that's what I've been up to thanks for listening [Applause]