About Charlotte
My work operates as what Ann Cvetkovich describes as a slow and steady, resilient bid for survival.
Attuned to the muted violence of life under late-stage capitalism, it attempts to locate moments of grace and open space for the erotic, while attending to the ethical and affective conditions through which contemporary feminine subjectivity is lived and shared.
The Pale Soft Palaces of Death, a recent body of work, continues this investigation, exploring the blessings and brutality that shape intimacy through presence and absence. Engaging themes of death, hauntology, longing, and love, the work might be understood as an embodied love letter.
With a background in publishing, fashion, and craft practices, I work across experimental writing, studio practice, and installation. My materials include glass, photography, graphics, oil on canvas, moving image, textiles, and prose. Each project begins with practice-based research into a theme, idea, or speculation. Through writing, image research, and tactile engagement with materials, I develop a visual and textual language that gradually coheres into a body of work.
Meaning emerges through spatial and conceptual relations. It is through the curation, organisation, and interruption of forms in space that the work fully takes shape. Decisions around medium, scale, and placement arise through an ongoing dialogue between concept and material, where selection, editing, and juxtaposition become central methods of construction.
Theoretically, I explore contemporary subjectivity through politics, psychoanalysis, and spirituality. While the work is often autoethnographic, it extends toward the socio-political, tracing shared feminine experiences through attachment and loss, desire and power. I am drawn to forms that resist easy resolution: affective, unstable, and materially difficult propositions that ask to be held in tension rather than explained.
The movement between text and studio, contemplation and action, and the spatial relation between work and audience creates a pause—an interval in which interior life can surface. In this sense, the practice is also mystical: not as transcendence, but as a way of staying with contradiction and remaining open to what cannot be fully named.
charlotte.troy@gmail.com
@victorious_hermit
Timeline
Current
MFA at City & Guilds of London Art School
Art Practice
Ceramic and textile artwork — vases, planters, wall hangings, quilts, and functional pottery. Works reference The Vedas, The Bible, Georges Bataille, R.D. Laing, and Alice Fulton.
Teaching — LCF, UAL
The Antifragile project — series of teaching and learning events exploring radical pedagogies through Nassim Taleb's Antifragile philosophy. Included a teaching intervention at a secondary school in Stratford and an installation at LCF.
What does it mean to be ANTI-FRAGILE for GEN Z? — video installation produced by first-year fashion communication students exploring “The Personal is Political.”
ICA x Softlaunch: Radical Play — event with Entr'acte on networking and community building through radical play.
Pleasure Activism and What Can a Body Do? — panel discussion at LCF inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown. Speakers: Rani Patel Williams, Wilson Oryema, Delali Ayivi.
Collective Joy in the Classroom — published research on pedagogic practice.
The Long Table — three published research documents: Ecologies, Identity, Society.
The Antifragile Classroom — online workshop for school teachers hosted by UAL Insights and LCF on radical pedagogies and wellbeing.
Memories Last Longer than Things — event at LCF on experiential culture and communication. With Daniel Caulfield-Sriklad, Bompas and Parr, and Lucy Hardcastle.
Print Matters — event at LCF headlined by Lucinda Chambers (Fashion Director, British Vogue). Panels with Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, Ben Freeman, Susanna Cordner.
Publishing — CT Editions
Dispense and Connect — panel at the Hayward Gallery's ‘100 Ideas’ series with Sina Najafi, Bice Curiger, Barry Miles, and Maria Fusco.
What's Next? — 100 Years of the Contemporary Art Society: Inside Public Collections. Edited by Lucy Byatt and Charlotte Troy.
New Math — limited edition of 250 postcard sets by Craig Damrauer, published for Ed Ruscha's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
Hijack Reality — book celebrating the tenth anniversary of Deptford X. Introduction by Matthew Collings, manifesto by Bob and Roberta Smith. Distributed by Thames & Hudson.
CT Pocket — first arts bookshop in Deptford, located inside BEARSPACE gallery. Launch titles curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
The Moon — feminist free newspaper for Oriana Fox's event at Tate Modern. Essays by Catherine Grant, Judith Batalion, Meredith Brown, and Marianne Mulvey.
Monologues 1 — audio publication on cassette. Mark Fisher and Sally O'Reilly. Co-published with Entr'acte.
Film as a Subversive Art — CT Editions brought Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 book back into print.
MAN-MADE — four-day commercial experiment during Frieze Art Fair. Collaborators included Emily King, Oriana Fox, Shelley Parker, and Bompas and Parr.
Q&A — free zine distributed through the ICA and Koenig Books. Interviews with Terry Hall, Susan Hiller, Peter Saville, Cosey Fanni Tutti, David Shrigley, Thurston Moore and others.
Home Sweet Home 102 — Charlotte's first book. Contributions from Richard Hamilton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mark Borthwick, Bless, and Leah Singer.
Education
MA in Contemporary Art Theory, Goldsmiths
MA in Publishing
Early Career
Buyer, stylist and creative director during her 20s.