Charlotte Colbert is ambitious and single-minded. She approaches life with a dash of obsessiveness, a quality applied to everything from her photography to her clothes to food. Colbert will eat the same meal on repeat for weeks until she can’t stand the sight of it. (Don’t ask her about sardines.)
Born in New York, Colbert, 37, first found her creative voice writing stories and newspaper articles as a high-school student in France. She cemented that passion while studying screenwriting at the London Film School. Colbert graduated from university primed for success, working first as a runner on sets, then as a script reader and a production assistant. She took any job that would plunge her further into the world of moviemaking.
But the industry was relentless and the compensation meager, so Colbert started writing and honing her photography skills in the time between jobs. She created a series of large, haunting triptychs with her black-and-white landscape photographs of a trip through Scotland. The work caught the eye of a London-based curator and led to Colbert’s first exhibition, at the Lichfield Studios, in Notting Hill, in 2011. It was a simple affair compared with her current Frieze London show, “Dreamland Sirens,” which incorporates sound, wearable art, and large sculptures.
Her stripped-back yet arresting photographs were an immediate hit. Since Colbert’s first show, her work has been featured at the Saatchi Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Somerset House, and the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as at many major international fairs, including Hong Kong’s Art Basel and Contemporary Istanbul. Today, her art spans various mediums—from ceramics and installations to photography and film.
Colbert avoids the subject of her family. She is one of James Goldsmith’s eight children. He’s the billionaire British financier who unapologetically maintained three families and kept homes in four countries until he died of pancreatic cancer in 1997. Colbert’s mother, the French journalist Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, openly had an affair with Goldsmith while he was married to the English socialite Annabel Goldsmith. Colbert is a half-sibling of Jemima Khan, the well-known aristocratic journalist and filmmaker, as well as Zac Goldsmith, a British politician, and Ben Goldsmith, a financier and environmentalist.
A topic Colbert discusses eagerly is She Will, her debut feature film, which was released in August 2021. Directed by Colbert and co-written with Kitty Percy, the rousing psychological thriller stars Rupert Everett and Malcolm McDowell. The movie was critically lauded, but the experience reminded Colbert that “films are quite slow. It takes a long time,” she says. That brought Colbert back to her studio.
“Films are quite slow.”
Colbert found the ideal creative partner and co-curator for her Frieze London exhibition in Zuzanna Ciolek, the director of UTA Artist Space, in Los Angeles. “We both have this love of fairy tales and interest in magic. We’d been talking about a project based on Alice in Wonderland for ages,” she explains. The collaboration led to “Dreamland Sirens,” which opened this past week at the Fitzrovia Chapel. “It is completely out of a fairy tale,” says Colbert of the venue. “From floor to ceiling, it’s covered in these golden orthodox Byzantium-type mosaics that feel completely out of place, but kind of miraculous. You step into it and you’re in another world.”
Colbert wrangled Simon de Pury, a Swiss auctioneer and art dealer, to curate the show along with Ciolek, as well as composer Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister of Phoebe) to create a score for the exhibition, which is played through mermaid-shaped speakers. “We thought there was something quite interesting in trying to give a voice and a narrative within the space.”
In the show, which centers on a towering metal sculpture of an eye (inspired by the Pool of Tears from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Colbert reimagines misogyny and our discomfort with the female body. A recurring motif in her work is a Pepto Bismol–pink uterus. She finds the idea that a uterus is subversive “completely mind-boggling,” she says. “Your boss, everyone on earth, was in a uterus.”
While Colbert is not the first artist to be influenced by Lewis Carroll, what sets her apart is her ability to put a contemporary spin on classic stories. “The big visualizers of today, like Elon Musk, all those guys were raised on and loved these books,” says Colbert. “As a collective, we need to come to the world with a dream, not simply a reaction to the problems in the world.”
“What we imagine has an impact,” says Colbert. “And if we’re not careful, and we don’t visualize what we want, we’ll never get there.”
“Dreamland Sirens” is on at Fitzrovia Chapel, in London, through October 21
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Bridget Arsenault is the London Editor at AIR MAIL