Charlotte Warne Thomas was born in and lives in London, UK.

My practice is inspired by my own experinece of motherhood and mothering, and my observations of – and reserach into – how society treats women. My most recent work arose from the experience of caring for my young son and dying mother during the covid-19 pandemic and the inescapable reality that it was the women/mothers whose invisible labour behind the scenes kept everything going. My practice explores the hierarchies of value placed on different kinds of labour; I’m interested both in mothers' unpaid domestic care and that of women artists, whose work continues to be undervalued by a market-oriented art world. The role of ‘love’ in relation to the concepts of reproductive labour and emotional labour in historial and contemporary feminist discourse is a core concern.

My work is often based on photographing my own body and surroundings, and includes performance, sculpture, installation, collage, AV, and found text, which I harvest from advertising and social media. I sometimes use gold, exploiting its seductive and versatile materiality to articulate ideas of the solidity and flux of value in different kinds of labour, in an increasingly financialized global economy. I’m writing up my practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University, funded by Techne (AHRC). 

Bio

Charlotte graduated from Goldsmiths MFA in 2009, and has exhibited nationally and internationally including Deptford X; APT Gallery, David Roberts Art Foundation, ASC Gallery, Chelsea Space (all London, UK); Exeter Phoenix (Exeter); Woodend Gallery (Scarborough); RBSA Gallery (Birmingham); Focal Point (Southend-on-Sea), Phoenix (Brighton); Fundación Santander (Madrid, Spain); Studio X (Mumbai, India); Artplay (Moscow, Russia); Frans Masareel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium). In 2025 her work was long-listed for the Women in Art prize, and selected for the Exeter Contemporary Open, the RBSA Photography Prize 2025 exhibition, and for the online exhibition This is Essential Work. 

Charlotte is a lecturer in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts and works for the Art Working Parents Alliance. She is a trained mentor and certified Powered by Diversity Ambassador and founder of long-standing crit group Peer Sessions, alongside fellow artist Kate Pickering. 

She is passionate about overcoming structural inequalities and barriers to access in the art world, an area she researched in her report Artsits as Workers for The Autonomy Institute. She was consultant editor for Structurally F~cked, a pivotal inquiry into the dire state of artists’ pay and conditions, published by a-n, and has since presented at the All Party Parliamentary Group for Visual Arts; at Tate committees on addressing increasing financial pressures, and has written for Art Review, DACS, and Artquest on making the Visual Arts sector more equitable.