Charlotte Ager 

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Where are you from?

The Isle of Wight, an island at the bottom of the UK for anyone who doesn’t know!


Where is home now? Where has home been?

Home is still there because it’s where my mum is and it’s still a place I know like the back of my hand. And also I love the sea. I spent a lot of time trying to disown it when I moved to London to study but after a while, I think you start to appreciate that it’s not just a place but also the familiarity that comes with it. There are a lot of things I hate about it but it still has all the threads that tie me down and that are a comforting thing sometimes.


What does your daily routine look like? Do you consider yourself a habitual or sporadic person?

I don’t really have a routine I have all the time, I get into routines when I’m working on projects and I actually really like having them when I do it can be quite comforting but at the same time I’m very impatient and want to do new things. Either way, I’m definitely a morning person, I like running early in the morning when no-ones around.




Where do you draw inspiration from, both visually and in the themes and ideas you choose to present?

I think a lot of my work is quite external, I find myself responding to what I see every day. That’s what so wonderful about drawing, it starts to make you see things differently, it’s like have 2 visions. Sometimes I feel guilty that my work doesn’t take on huge themes (by sometimes I mean a lot, I feel like I spend a lot of time feeling guilty for making work) but recently someone told me there’s nothing wrong with making work that celebrates the way you see things. To me when I’m making things it’s not in any way a passive thing, I’m thinking all the time and everything I’m thinking I think starts to come across in my work. I draw a lot of inspiration from the books; I’m constantly amazed by language.


Are there any specific current events or issues that you have been addressing in your work?

Not in a straightforward way, I listen to lots of things and read lots of things and recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how and what we choose to talk about to others. I saw something recently about how most Newspaper headlines are written by men but because it’s not transparent, we don’t really notice. The writer of an article is often small at the bottom of a page. But isn’t that crazy? That our news is fed to us in this way and we barely notice. I’m interested in language and how things could be told differently. I guess because I read a lot I find a disparity in how well things are understood in books that isn’t the case for everyday media, for obvious reasons. I don’t know, I just find it interesting. I have incredibly passionate friends and I am always amazed by how emotively charged what they talk about is. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this in work I make recently, trying to think of ways we tell narratives and how it can be told in a subtler, emotive way that’s true to human experience.





What do you think has helped you find such a distinctive fluid style?

A love-hate relationship with everything I ever do because it’s kept me going! I don’t think I have a style but other people tell me I do! It’s just from making a lot of things, figuring out what I like and don’t like (mostly don’t like) that keeps me trying to make things and on the way I guess I’ve developed something. 


Have you always been drawn towards illustration and animation?

Maybe? Weirdly I didn’t think I had but I have a cardboard sign I made when I must have been 10 which says ‘charlotte’s illustration studio’ which I hung in my ‘making room’ so maybe it’s always been slightly subconscious! When I was really young I loved drawing to bits but as a lot of people find at school you start to become self-conscious and although people said I was good at it, I spent a lot of time hating the whole thing. I think because it was fine art I was doing I felt a little lost. I went to do a foundation course just to see what might happen and now I owe a ridiculous amount to it. It was the foundation Course at Kingston University in London and it made me really really care about making work again. I can’t recommend it enough. I chose illustration as a pathway and I loved drawing again, we were encouraged to draw on location something that I’d never really done and it just got me so rattled. The thinking and analyzing of the world that I learned through the course just spoke to me and I don’t think I’d be doing any of this now if I hadn’t done it.





Looking at your body of work there is a really noticeable use of vibrant color, what draws you to the palate you use? 

Ironically probably in a big part my art lessons at school, because a lot of them were simply copying famous artists work. I copied endless Matisse’s, Gauguin’s, Picassos, Cezanne’s pretty mindlessly but I think it made me really care about color and start to see color in everything. Color to me is quite intuitive, I’m just responding to what I see around me rather than consciously coming up with color palettes, if I ever do try and do that, the work is normally not very good. I really love the quote from Matisse ‘Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.’ Which is just spot on.


How would you describe your creative process?

Annoying, persisting, aggravating, joyful, and extremely delightful.


Cite three artists you admire.

Alfred Wallis 

Tove Janson

Edward Bawden


What book(s) have inspired you?

My favorite book is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and I’ve found myself coming back to it a thousand times, it’s a visual delight but what I really love is the language of human intimacy, there are so many moments when you’re like YES! Yes! That’s how that feels! That thing that you can’t articulate. There are so many books that have inspired me I feel like I should reel off some so other people can enjoy them; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (the portrayal of friendship and really loving people is painfully accurate), The Goldfinch by Donna Tart (my favorite author and this book got me through a lot) 1234 Paul austere, I capture the castle Dodie Smith, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.


What songs would be on your ideal playlist?

I’m currently incapable of listening to anything other than the soundtrack to call Me by your Name for any long period of time. So all those songs would be on there. Definitely, Frank Ocean because I will listen to it in any mood. Also the Amy Winehouse song What is it about men which I find myself listening to a lot. Well, that’s a start!


How do you think social media is changing the art world? Do you consider it a useful tool for artists?

Incredibly! It’s helped me a lot and I sometimes feel silly talking about it because people can be so damning of Instagram and social media (which is perfectly fair, it has a lot of flaws) but for me and for lots of people it’s a chance to share my work and find people to work with, I’m naturally quite shy with my work, I’m not that confident and I find it extremely hard to talk about it. But it’s allowed my work to talk for itself and I’ve felt so supported by people I’ve never met, I think it’s amazing that you can see things from all over the world in an instant! It allows so many more artists to have a voice regardless of who they know. People are always saying the art world is about who you know, but social media allows that part to become less important, you don’t have to be selling yourself, you can just show what you want to show. At the same time, I understand that it’s a source of great anxiety for a lot of creative people, to be constantly seeing other people’s work and worrying yours isn’t good enough, but it’s about recognizing social media's place in the creative world and actively reminding yourself of what it actually is.




What kinds of things would exist in your ideal world?

Somehow a lot of the things I want to be in the world to make it ideal already exist, my friend once told me I’m never satisfied which is often true but I am incredibly amazed by the world we’re in already, the people and brains and ideas and places. I think I’d want things to be slower. It’s more what I wouldn’t want to exist that exists now like helplessness and stubbornness and greed and all the emotions that make people act terribly.



Describe what happiness means to you?

Making other people happy. My friends laughing their guts out. Perspective. Working.