Iranzu Baker

CHARLOTTE DAWSON: ON COLLECTING, THE IMAGINED OTHER
AND THE LAST USE OF THINGS

Ahead of her new exhibition opening at Humber Street Gallery, Hull, this week, Charlotte Dawson talked me through her research process and how childhood memories of collecting with her family have shaped her practice, with one body of work informing the next.

There's a piece at Charlotte Dawson's new show that she isn't ready to describe in detail before opening night. What she will say is that it will ask visitors to move through the space with the same care you'd take crossing a graveyard. Informed by a childhood collecting conkers with her brother in their local cemetery, and her mum who often turned family walks into expeditions for fossils and pebbles. "I had to be dragged away from too many rocks," she says. "You can't have all of the rocks."

Talking to Dawson, it becomes clear that collecting isn't a stage that precedes her work, it’s a significant theme throughout it, played out slowly over the years and across bodies of work that keep quietly returning to one another. And it's why her pieces so often land as familiarly unfamiliar: roadside flowers memorials, the markings road workers leave behind to domestic objects we see and use in shared spaces. Objects and scenes we walk past daily without registering, until Dawson quietly represents them so that we start to notice. 

Dawson's process often starts with a photograph taken on her phone. Something noticed in passing on a street or in a shared building and then filed away without much thought. "Sometimes they sit on my phone for a long time before I realise there's a work in there," she says. What struck me here is that the photograph itself is already a collected object. Long before anything is made, Dawson gathers visual moments and they sit in her phone archive until noticed again.

That's exactly how Underside/Understood came together: crooked utility markers, the spray-painted symbols road workers leave to flag repairs, and gravestones with layout errors — one, in a Welsh cemetery, carved by hand with the word "body" split awkwardly across two lines because the mason misjudged the space. Three unrelated fixations, photographed separately over months, that only later revealed themselves as the same question. "They're talking to the same thing," she says — "this presence of people," whether it's a stonemason, a road worker, or whoever left the mark. "It's all about signposting, leaving a mark, and the underneath — the ground." Recognition, for Dawson, is never a decision. It's a dawning.

The imagined other
This is where Dawson's work becomes, to me, genuinely moving. Across everything she makes, there's a recurring interest in someone who isn't present but is unmistakably there — a person implied by a trace, rather than shown outright. It's there in the road markings, and in the mason's mistake. And it's there, most tenderly, in the artificial flowers that thread through the new Humber Street show: the ones left on roadside memorials, in church windows, or in municipal bathrooms alongside faded potpourri. "There's this person who's taking care of this space," Dawson says, "who's not part of our imagined imagery of that building, but actually is really part of that building." It's the same instinct behind the church kneelers she's drawn to — hassocks stitched by hand, by people with no formal role in the church hierarchy, worn down over years by other people's knees. Labour-intensive, anonymous, and made to be used until it shows. None of this is about religion, she's careful to say. It's about the trace of someone else's care in a space that isn't supposed to register individuality at all — "the street is meant to be clinical," as she puts it, "and we're not meant to leave our own marks on it, but we do."

Where one piece ends, another begins
What I find most compelling, having now read and listened to Dawson speak about her practice at length, is how rarely a project fully ends. One piece leaves a residue that resurfaces, sometimes years later, in something else entirely. The clearest example is a small floral motif, bound with cable ties, that appears on one of the jesmonite plates in Here/There — itself a body of work about Blackpool's tension between leisure and labour. That same site, and the same cable ties, went on to become the subject of an entirely different piece: Just Passing I, a hand-stitched embroidery Dawson began during the first Covid lockdown, when she couldn't get into her studio to make sculpture. Three years later, passing through the same Blackpool site by chance, she found fresh flowers had been laid in exactly the same spot — proof that whoever had been leaving them was still returning. That second encounter became Just Passing II. The fading of the fabric in the earlier piece, she suspects, may even mirror the literal bleaching of the flowers it depicts — though she admits she still isn't sure whether that's the sun, or simply how her materials have aged. It's a small but telling detail: a piece she once photographed for one project, discarded, then stitched into another, deepened, and returned to — and it says something about how Dawson works generally. Nothing is used once and filed away. Objects, images, and even entire sites get picked up, put down, and picked up again, the way you might return to a chapel embroidery she's been dipping in and out of for three years, and which resurfaces — appropriately — in the new Hull show.

An archive of the ordinary
The turning point in Dawson's relationship to collecting came early, during a residency in Stoke-on-Trent, her first after graduating. She found herself in a city built almost literally on ceramic history — shards mixed into demolition rubble, buried under the foundations of its buildings — and it led her to an archive for the first time, not to research the past in the abstract, but to look at objects formally designated as worth keeping. That distinction, between an object still in use and one that's been acquired, has stayed with her ever since. "I'm really interested in the point of the last use," she says — the moment an object stops being used by someone and is fixed, permanently, in a collection. It's rarely the owner's decision, and it often coincides, she points out, with the owner's death: "they're the last person that gets to use this." An ordinary object, in that instant, becomes something else entirely — a plate, a cup, a marker post, forever attached to a life that's ended. You can see the same instinct playing out at home, long before any of this had a name. The Dawson family didn't collect in any formal sense, but display shelves ran around the top of a room, filled with teacups and saucers too precious from great-grandparents to use — some broken while dusting, superglued back together, kept anyway. Several of the plates her mother collected came from local Methodist chapels, which is part of why the teacups appearing in the Humber Street show carry what Dawson calls a "utilitarian" colour palette — a quiet, secular echo of a religious inheritance nobody in the family still practises.

Into the space
What's different about this show, Dawson tells me, is that it didn't grow out of a residency. Her previous bodies of work — Here/There, Underside/Understood — each began with sustained time in a specific place. Humber Street began instead as a conversation with curator Lauren Wilson, built around what Dawson was already thinking about rather than a commission to respond directly to Hull. And yet she still visited — noting, in particular, the memorial to lost fishermen on the street just behind the gallery, with its own artificial flowers. "There's a universality to the objects on show," she says, "but I think it fits into the context of Hull." It's a more exposed way of working, she admits — without a place to hide behind, "you're just making a body of work that's your interest," trusting that what resonates with her will resonate with people who don't know the backstory. A recent studio crit, done without narration — she could only show the work, not explain it — reassured her it does. "People had really good responses to it without having any knowledge about what the work was bringing," she says. "I'm not mad, and the things I'm thinking about are relevant." Which brings us back to that unrevealed centrepiece, and the childhood habit of collecting it grew from — about to be walked through by strangers who'll have no idea what they're retracing. That, more than anything, seems to be the quiet aim of Dawson's practice: to take something private and specific enough to be true, and trust that it's universal enough to be felt.

If Memory Serves Me Well
10 July – 20 September 2026

Humber Street Gallery
64 Humber Street
Hull HU1 1TU