Charlotte Collins

My body of work is a series of paintings that draw influence from childhood photographs and explore themes of nostalgia, childhood innocence and fading memories.

I use my own childhood photographs as references for my paintings and these memory archives fuel curiosity about the relationship I have with my childhood. This work is an exploration of the act of reaching for memories that have slipped away, or in other words, the examination of the nostalgia of childhood. The artists Jennifer Packer, Alice Neel, and Liu Xiaodong have had a big influence on my work as they paint humans in their most authentic forms, while capturing the intimacy and reflection that is there when you present humans in that way. My painting, Daffodils, 2005, captures a childhood “memory” that is fading into the parts of the scene that I know and remember—simultaneously keeping this memory alive and letting it fade away.

My work aims to question what it means for me to look back and visit these childhood archives and explore the juxtaposition of what is a memory and what is instead just a photograph in a family album. These paintings use the lens of nostalgia to revisit childhood relationships and experiences while capturing the emotion of that time.