Out of the Scriptorium: De-writing the Journeyman, Re-Wilding the Domestic and Making Space
This practice-based research redraws literary and natural landscapes via an original entanglement of geopoetics, feminist and literary theory, walking, and geometry. Using fresco, assemblage, domestic arts, biomaterials (such as honeycomb), sound and printmaking, the research dissolves literary texts in a process neologised here as ‘dewriting’. By testing the archetypal properties of paper, ink, and milk, the project creates imaginary libraries, books conceptualised as ‘desemic’ texts, ‘pages’ made of laser-etched milk, and frescoed objects. The research includes the construction of a medical cabinet filled with 42 pints of milk, the weekly dose devised by 19th-century physician Silas Weir Mitchell and force-fed to women judged to be in need of 'calming'.
I extract fictional and nonfictional women from their original stories, both from my past and from works by Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. I focalise these women as art objects, reconfiguring them in new, communal narratives. The catalyst for all four women is my invented character known as May who has walked the natural landscape for hundreds of years. May is a composite woman; she embodies both the Medieval life-writer Margery Kempe, myself as a literary scholar, and the spirit of women who have walked the earth for centuries. May, who moves conceptually across wild terrain with her distinctive travelling library, creates a space that is enabling and unbounded for the women characters who come after her. She is both repository and synthesis. The central research question is whether May and her library can configure limitless, newly-readable possibilities for entrapped female characters travelling unfamiliar territory.
Taking the form of a legend, the research dewrites restless, oppressed and neglected Maggie from The Mill on the Floss, Rhoda from The Waves, Lucy from Villette, and Susie, my impoverished great aunt born in 1899. In dissolving the literary and familial texts that hold these characters up, the project asks whether women can be re-embodied in new and mutually sustaining ways; what role might excavation (of both self and landscape) play in decoding and rewriting women as they walk without their texts? What might emerge from their newly materialised and reconfigured life stories? How can these re-visualised narratives draw attention to women’s ongoing struggle for intellectual enrichment? What new stories can be etched into handmade milk 'paper'?
This inquiry uses a ‘seeing’ frame of the strange loop, a geometric form with a logic-defying ability to continually rise in height whilst returning to where it started. It is a democratic and equalising construct and, as such, is a leveller. A strange loop is infinitely expandable and, like a library, can be filled with new women and new texts, ad infinitum. The research assesses whether the self-referential construct of a strange loop can produce a new visual language for women in the landscape and address a series of political questions about their entitlement to walk unhindered and unjudged.
Life-writing, with its infinitely flexible scope, extracts the project from the confines of the more rigid terms of ‘autography’ or ‘autobiography'. In an original contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of life-writing and visual storytelling, characters are liberated from their fictions, dewritten, and entangled via visual-art. The work looks through and beyond the surfaces of past and future landscapes, giving space to fictional bodies and new narratives. It dewrites and rewrites a visual legend of potential inclusivity.
Key words: visual life-writing, feminist art practice, craft histories, dewriting text, narrative art.
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More about Charlie
Biography
Charlie Lee-Potter is an artist, writer, broadcaster and academic. She creates installations and book objects, stages imaginary narrative encounters, performs her poetry, and conducts artistic time-trials using fibre-arts, printmaking, typography and soundscape. Her focus is on the way that women – both real and fictional – interact imaginatively. She manipulates biomaterials as part of her practice, and constructs artworks from etched milk, woven and crocheted paper thread, frescoed plaster, and print.
As the former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM, The World at One, Open Book, The World Tonight and The World This Weekend, Charlie continues to explore the interplay between soundscape and the spoken word. She composes geophonic and vocal soundscapes, mixing them with her own fixed verse. Her 2025 poetry performance with the orchestra of Sinfonia Smith Square received 5 star reviews. Charlie’s podcast exploring the connections between walking and creative thinking, Inside A Mountain, was shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. Recent episodes include sound walks with the international cellist Natalie Clein, poet Ian MacMillan, writer Noreen Masud, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and artists Fungai Marima and Anna Koska. She has written for many national and international magazines and newspapers and is the recent recipient of the International Créateurs Design Prize for Creative Journalism.
Out of the Scriptorium, Charlie's recent solo show at Persephone Books in Bath, was described by one reviewer as ‘an extraordinary, original, arresting, eloquent and profoundly moving art installation exploring the painful journeys of women who wanted to write fiction from side-lined silence into print.’
Degrees
PhD Fine Art, Royal College of Art
PhD English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London
MA Fine Art: Printmaking, Camberwell College of Art, UAL: distinction
BA English, University of London: first class
Awards
2023 Podcast, Inside A Mountain, shortlisted for the International Women's Podcast Awards
2022 Winner, the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism
2021 Shortlisted for the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism
2020 The Printmakers Council Prize
2019 Teaching Excellence Prize, Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London
2018 Shortlisted for the University English Prize for monograph Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic)
2008-2013 Royal Holloway, University of London Research Scholarship
Exhibitions
2025 Solo show, Persephone Books, Bath
2025 RCA Research Biennale, London
2024 Chasma, Beaconsfield Gallery, London.
2023 Earthwise, Beaconsfield Gallery, London.
2023 Hopscotch, Copeland Gallery, London.
2023 Emerging Matters, Espacio Gallery, London.
2022 Withheld, Safehouse Gallery, London.
2022 Royal Birmingham Art Society.
2022 Southwark Park Galleries, London.
2022 Oxford Art Society.
2021 Zuleika Gallery, Woodstock
2021 Solid Air art exhibition, No Format Gallery, London
2020 Changing Landscapes exhibition, Central Saint Martins
2020 Woolwich Printmaking Fair
2017 The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, USA, Juried Biennial International Miniature Print Competition
Publications
Selected publications include:
Monographs:
2017 Writing the 9/11 Decade:
Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic)
ISBN 979-1-5013-1320-2
Afterwords:
2017 Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest,
(London: Persephone Books)
ISBN: 978-1-9102-6311-2
Book Chapters:
2017 These Islands: A Portrait of the British Isles
(London: Francis)
ISBN: 978-0-9930-4974-3
Walking the city: three chapters on the flâneur/walker in Edinburgh, London and Bath
Small sample of essays, reviews and articles:
Cereal magazine:
Auguste Rodin
Park Seo Bo and the Dansaekhwa art movement
Donald Judd
John Pawson
Agnes Martin
Disegno magazine: Paul Baker, Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language
The Independent:
Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
Simonetta Wenkert, The Half-Known Life
Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
Caroline Oulton, Unsafe Attachments
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife
Joanna Trollope, Friday Nights
Valerie Martin, Trespass
Grace Bowman, Thin
Andrew Motion, In the Blood
Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer
Meg Wolitzer, The Position
Dorothy Whipple, They Were Sisters
Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces,
Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
Slightly Foxed:
Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
The Observer: Gillian Slovo, Ice Road
Jay Rayner, The Apologist
New Statesman:
Richard Benson, The Farm
Roger Scruton, News from Somewhere
Conferences
Selection of invited papers, lectures, workshops and masterclasses:
2025 Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Out of the Scriptorium
2024 Art and the Domestic, Persephone Festival
2024 Writing Colour, Wytham
2023 Rewriting Lily Briscoe's painting: Royal College of Art
2021 Thame Arts and Literature Festival: Interview with Kate Kennedy: Dweller in Shadows
2020 Thame Arts and Literature Festival: Interview with Gill Hornby, Miss Austen
2019 Bookbinding and Printmaking Workshop: Worcester College, University of Oxford
2018 Faulkner Studies Colloquium: ‘Unbroken-surfaced confusion’: geometric shapes in As I Lay Dying
2017 Thame Arts and Literature festival: Marie-Elsa Bragg, Towards Mellbreak
2017 Persephone Books lunchtime lecture series: Effi Briest and the nineteenth-century adultery novel
2016 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford: Primary witnesses: gathering post-9/11 testimony
2016 Royal Holloway, University of London: Masterclass on the art of interviewing and writing
2015/2016 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford: Interdisciplinary creative-writing workshops
2015 Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford:
Interdisciplinary creative-writing workshops:
Number theory and topology in literary texts
Futurism, food, and sensory writing
2014 Oxford Union Debate
Participant on regulation of the press
2014 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
Feminism and Friendlessness in The Good Wife
E Pluribus Unum: Television Cultures of the United States seminar series
2013 Royal Holloway, University of London
Finding a form to accommodate the mess: language and expression in the post-9/11 novel.
Media, War and Conflict Conference (participant)
2011 Dulwich College Symposium, ‘Science and the Imagination’
Galvanizing Frankenstein: the art of Mary Shelley’s science (invited paper)
2002-2006 Newnham College, Cambridge
Persephone Books Literary Conferences:
Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own
The short stories of Elizabeth Berridge
Marginality in Joanna Cannan’s Princes in the Land
2005 Oxford public lecture:
The History of the Oxford Novel
2002 Hay Literary Festival:
Presenter and guest interviewer
Jazz rhythms in the fiction of Sebastian Faulks
The fiction of Nicholas EvansI
Performances, residencies and fellowships :
Performances:
2025 Poetry and orchestral performance, Orbiting the Light, Symphony Smith Square, London
2023 ‘Performing the artist’s book’ – live art performance dissolving and reconstructing an artist’s book, Copeland Gallery, London.
2023 ‘Creating an artist’s book from milk and ink’ – live art performance, Beaconsfield Gallery, London.
Residencies:
2024 2025 Writer in Residence, Wytham Woods, Oxford
2019 Artist in Residence, Gloucester, Virginia, USA
Fellowships:
Fellow, Higher Education Academy
Fellow, Royal Society of Arts