The Feminine Sublime: A Deep Dive into Charlotte Colbert's Provocative Art
There are artists who create beautiful things, and then there are artists who create necessary things. Charlotte Colbert firmly belongs to the latter category. In our chat with her, the multidisciplinary artist opened up about her journey from photography to film, her exploration of feminist themes, and why she feels driven to create work that challenges our most deeply held assumptions about gender, power, and the female experience.
From Photography to Film: An Organic Evolution
Colbert's artistic journey began with photography, specifically her haunting "Stornoway" series – black and white triptychs that captured what she describes as "fantasy escape of the mind." These early works emerged from a practical need during her screenwriting days, when the sedentary nature of writing was driving her to distraction.
"I started taking photographs as a kind of way to actualize the imagery," she explains, describing how her photography became a means of exploring the psychological landscape of creativity itself – both imprisoning and freeing, where "you exist in your own mind and you spend so much time on your own, you're like giving doorknobs names."
This organic transition from one medium to another reflects Colbert's broader artistic philosophy. When asked whether she considers herself an artist or filmmaker, she resists categorization entirely: "If you're living in some kind of organism and you see the world in terms of something that you can reinvent, then in some ways, you kind of have that approach with a cup or with some clothes or with whatever."
Reframing the Male Gaze
Perhaps nowhere is Colbert's provocative approach more evident than in her video installation reimagining Lucian Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" – the painting that holds the record for highest price paid for a living painter. But where Freud's work presents Sue Tilley, the benefits supervisor, as a static subject of the male gaze, Colbert's piece fundamentally disrupts this dynamic.
"I was very interested in sort of re-appropriating the kind of male gaze on the body," Colbert explains. Her installation restages the scene with Tilley in the same pose, but now she's alive, breathing, and crucially, she opens her eyes. "She opens her eyes and you're like, oh God, she's looking at me and I was looking at her... who is the liar here?"
The piece goes further by fragmenting Tilley's body across multiple screens – a deliberate "chopping of her body" that Colbert sees as reflecting how "the female body is cut and spliced and pulled apart and then put back together by a viewer." It's a powerful commentary on how women's bodies are commodified and consumed, particularly relevant in our Instagram age.
The Politics of Motherhood and Form
Colbert's work doesn't shy away from the more complex aspects of feminine experience. Her sculpture work, including large-scale pieces exploring pregnancy and motherhood, emerged from her own bewildering experience of pregnancy. "When I was pregnant... your body feels totally alien," she recalls. "It's kind of awe inspiring... it feels like so powerful but then it also feels so not your own."
This honest exploration of motherhood – including the moment when her newborn felt like "this little old Chinese man suckling on my nipple" – reflects her broader approach to art-making. She's not interested in presenting sanitized or idealized versions of feminine experience, but rather in grappling with the full complexity of what it means to inhabit a female body in the world.
Gothic Fairy Tales and Feminist Vengeance
Colbert's film work, including her feature described as "otherworldly feminist vengeance," continues these themes through what she calls "gothic fairy tales." Her work often features older women – a deliberate choice in an industry that typically sidelines aging actresses. The difficulty she faced in getting financing for a film with an older female lead speaks to broader systemic issues in the film industry.
These narratives explore what she calls "muscle memory that's carried through the earth and through our DNA" – the idea that trauma and healing can be transmitted across generations. Her films ask what happens when women, particularly older women, claim their power and seek their own form of justice.
Living with Art, Changing the World
Walking into Colbert's home, you're immediately struck by the seamless integration of art and life. Uterus symbols and eyes – her personal iconography – sit alongside her partner's lobster and cactus motifs. For Colbert, this isn't decoration but a way of living within a constantly reimagined reality.
She's particularly fascinated by the uterus as symbol, noting its resemblance to the Christian cross and theorizing that "a lot of the monotheistic symbols plastered themselves on pre-Patriarchal hierarchies and systems." It's a reminder, she says, that "everything could be different... that you can never trust anything because we could rethink everything in a different way."
This philosophy extends to her thoughts on society more broadly. She's troubled by the misallocation of resources in our culture – "All that money... just to make us feel shit about ourselves" – and sees art as a potential antidote to what she calls "consumerist totalitarianism."
The Necessity of Difficult Art
When asked why she creates, Colbert's answer is both simple and profound: "I probably wouldn't be able to do anything else." Her work emerges from a fundamental need to navigate reality through fiction, to survive by creating alternative ways of understanding the world.
This necessity drives her to create work that doesn't seek to comfort or please, but rather to provoke and challenge. Her films are genuinely difficult to watch – she mentions one where a character cuts off her finger, which then transforms into a penis. These aren't shock tactics but rather honest explorations of violence, sexuality, and power that refuse to look away from uncomfortable truths.
The Future of Feminine Art
Colbert's work sits at the intersection of multiple urgent conversations in contemporary art and society. Her exploration of feminist themes, her challenging of traditional power structures, and her refusal to separate art from politics make her a vital voice in current cultural discourse.
Perhaps most importantly, her work demonstrates that provocative art doesn't have to be nihilistic. Despite the darkness in her films and the challenging nature of her installations, there's ultimately something hopeful about Colbert's practice. By refusing to accept the world as it is, by constantly reimagining and reframing, she offers the possibility that things could indeed be different.
In a world that often feels increasingly polarized and difficult to navigate, artists like Charlotte Colbert serve as essential guides – not because they provide easy answers, but because they help us ask better questions. Her work reminds us that art's highest function isn't to decorate our lives but to help us understand them, challenge them, and ultimately, perhaps, transform them.
As she puts it, with characteristic directness: "We all come from a womb and that's insane. Even Donald Trump was squeezed into one one day." It's this kind of perspective – simultaneously cosmic and intimate, profound and practical – that makes Colbert's work so necessary in our current moment. In a time when the feminine is under attack from multiple directions, her art serves as both shield and sword, protecting and advancing a vision of what's possible when women refuse to be silenced, fragmented, or diminished.