Charlotte Ashman has a habit of making life difficult for herself.
This is not entirely accidental.
“Well, I just enjoy learning, really,” she says. “That kind of drives everything that I do.”
She paints, makes linocuts, works with ceramics, researches canal history and exhibits her work in galleries.
If something interests Charlotte, the fact that it might be awkward seems to have remarkably little bearing on whether she does it.
For the past few years, however, awkward had begun to win.
When I visited her, her studio wasn’t really a studio at all. It was wherever there happened to be enough room on the historic pair she lived aboard with her daughter Scarlett.
“If Scarlett’s at college for the day, I can spread out.”
That might mean taking over the living space to print, then clearing everything away again when it was needed for something else.
For some kinds of work, that was merely inconvenient. For others it presented more interesting problems.
Linocut printing, for example, involves paper, ink and waiting. Multi-colour prints can involve several stages over several days, with the paper needing to remain stable between each one. Charlotte had devised ways of managing the atmosphere around the work, including creating a drying space with a dehumidifier.
Ceramics had become harder still and had largely been put aside.
None of this had stopped her making art. If anything, limitation has played quite a large part in shaping the way Charlotte works.
But there is a difference between limitation being creatively useful and limitation simply consuming your time.
That distinction had become increasingly important.
Charlotte has lived on boats for much of her adult life, and eventually found herself living aboard a pair of historic working boats.
That brought its own set of skills. Working a motor and butty means learning how to manage two full-sized boats through locks and turns, deal with ropes efficiently and communicate when the sound of an engine makes ordinary conversation impossible.
Charlotte learned the hand signals too - something she describes, with some amusement, as “voguing”.
For a while, the pair also seemed to solve another problem.
Art takes up room.
Paper needs to lie flat. Prints need somewhere to dry. Paintings need walls. Materials accumulate. A printing press is not especially interested in the compromises required by domestic life.
A pair of boats gave Charlotte more space than she had previously had.
At first, that felt liberating.
But art practices evolve. So do households. And so does life. And the thing that had once solved a problem gradually became part of one.
“The thing that had become liberating became limiting,” Charlotte says.
Living aboard a pair of historic boats involved an increasing amount of logistics - moving, water, power, laundry, transport and simply coordinating everyday family life.
Plans could change quickly. Restrictions on the navigation could alter what was possible almost overnight. Jobs that are nearly invisible in a house had to be actively organised.
Charlotte realised that maintaining the machinery around her life was taking too much time away from the thing she actually wanted to do.
Make art.
So she moved into a house.
For someone who had spent so much of her life finding unconventional ways to live, it seems a bit contrary that the revolutionary solution turns out to involve mains electricity and water on tap.
Charlotte had expected some aspects of land life to feel wasteful.
Instead, she has found almost the opposite.
Years of living without unlimited electricity have left her with remarkably few electrical habits. She has no television, microwave or hairdryer. Her electricity bill has been unexpectedly small. Laundry no longer involves driving somewhere to find a machine. Recycling and composting happen routinely rather than requiring another journey to find the facilities.
There is water when she turns on the tap.
The toilet does not need emptying.
Individually, none of these things sounds particularly dramatic.
Collectively, they give time back.
And Charlotte has already begun spending some of it.
Recently she produced fifteen linocuts in a month for a book about the navvies who built Blisworth Tunnel.
“I wouldn’t have been able to churn out fifteen linocuts in a month,” she says of her old set-up. “That just wouldn’t have happened.”
She is also preparing for Open Studios, with exhibitions and markets filling much of September, while trying to get ahead with new work and greetings cards for Christmas.
She is not, she is quick to point out, exactly sitting around relaxing.
“I feel a lot more relaxed in myself. I’m not necessarily relaxing. But I feel a lot calmer.”
There is another difference she had not expected.
“I don’t feel like I’m being observed 24/7, which is really nice.”
Living on a boat can be strangely public. Your home is also an object of curiosity. People peer through windows, stop to look and ask questions. On busy towpaths, private domestic life and public space can be separated by little more than a few inches of steel.
A house has allowed Charlotte to disappear slightly.
Oddly, that has not made her less connected to the boating world.
It has done the opposite.
“I’ve actually spent more time socialising with my boat friends.”
When she lived aboard, friendships were often governed by geography. You met when boats happened to cross paths, at markets or events, and perhaps did not see one another again for months.
Now Charlotte phones people. She meets them for coffee. She goes to see them because she wants to see them, rather than because both boats happen to be in the same place.
“I kind of feel like people are saying, ‘You’re not allowed to leave. We’re not letting you go. You have to come and see us.’”
She reckons she has had more interaction with boating friends in the past three months than she had during the previous two years.
The waterways have not disappeared from Charlotte’s life.
Nor has everything she learned while living on them.
Her research still draws her towards canal history and the people whose lives have often slipped between the more familiar versions of it.
The boats gave Charlotte subjects, skills, friendships and an extraordinary amount of lived experience.
They also taught her how to work within limits.
Perhaps the latest lesson has been recognising when a limit has stopped being useful.
Because making room for art does not always mean finding another shelf, clearing another table or working out where to squeeze in a printing press.
Sometimes it means deciding what you are no longer prepared to make room for in your life.
photo credits: Joe Dixey
