Charlie Kirkham

Sudden Cardiac Art

A Coloration With HeartCharged

2 - 30 September 2024

From the passionate, albeit flawed, hearts of fine artist Charlie Kirkham and resuscitation advocates HeartCharged has come a revolutionary art exhibition and events at Kingshill House, September 2024, to end preventable cardiac deaths and gender disparity.

Bethany & Hannah, the girls from HeartCharged, live with the deadly heart condition, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Hannah is a sudden cardiac arrest survivor. They realized awareness before and quick actions during a sudden cardiac arrest from everyday citizens determines life or death. They went on a mission to train and inform people, children through adults, on using defibrillators and performing CPR.

Then they discovered to their horror that women had significantly lower survival rates because, even when they could, people were choosing not to help women, basically because of their breasts. It seemed unconscionable women were left to die. They vowed to change that.

Charlie saw the HeartCharged campaign and knew she needed to join. She too wanted to raise survival rates, for women, children, and men, from the current 10% to the attainable 70%. How could she, as an artist, enact change? Charlie knew that in museums the female breast was on display as art. Why would we keep it covered when it became a matter of life or death? She knew that through art people could see the beauty of saving another human and through awareness, they could learn how.

The Dragon Beyond Saint George

George & The Dragon Series

This series started with a visit to Southwark Cathedral, where a panel showing a battling George and the Dragon inspired a drawing and painted copy. Year later, a trip to Coventry Cathedral re-ignited a fascination with the traditional English folklore.

What was it about George and the Dragon that held such long term appeal?

Driving home it seemed like the Dragon had followed me, staring back from the logo of my Takeaway, hovering over movie posters, dancing in fire on computer game cases.

Boiling the kettle it seemed like the steam was the Dragon’s breath reminding me to tell the story. The Dragon was a vanished master, a creature created of magic that once ruler a world where the extraordinary met the everyday.

George, our chivalric hero, seemed to play a strange role. Saving a princess, saving a village but at the cost of the final Dragon leaving the world forever.

The phantom of that lost, last Dragon started to appear in my drawings, piece by piece telling the story of their strange life, death and legacy.

The 21st Century Minotaur

Life after the Labyrinth

“The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life—is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Inspired by the Steven Sherrill book, this series imagines the Minotaur living int he 21st Century. The Minotaur character mutates into multiples of itself, challenging the binary monochromatic world with it's otherness. In this series of watercolour and ink paintings we join the Minotaur as it tries to make sense of life as an outsider.