Rickshaw rides and would-you-rather with Charlie Osborne

It’s already dark out when Charlie Osborne rocks up to the doors of Plaster HQ. She’s wearing white tights under a pair of Superman pants and a pink plastic bag slung over her shoulder (like the old JD Sports bags that were a staple in every state school PE kit in the early 2010s). In her hand she’s clutching a silver harmonica that looks heavy duty enough to do some serious damage. She tells me it was one of her best eBay purchases and that it is now covered and clogged with glue after an attempt to turn it into a sculpture.

Charlie – artist, filmmaker, musician and model – graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in 2021. I first came across her work last year, when she featured as a guest on Mark Leckey’s monthly NTS show. Earlier that year, Charlie had exhibited her work as part of ‘In the Offing’, an exhibition Leckey curated at the Turner Contemporary, Margate. Charlie tells me that Leckey discovered her work when she approached him at a show and handed him a USB with one of her films on. Coincidentally Leckey already knew of her and had been trying to find the film online, to no avail.

That film, Old Town, explores the abandonment of human-occupied spaces worn down by years of austerity – a pertinent theme for many small towns around the UK. The film reminds me of the boarded-up relics I still see from the early 2000s: haunted Woolworths and Jane Normans – the ghostly remains of old high street empires. These liminal spaces are like portals, allowing dialogue between two separate passages of time. Charlie invents characters, anxious depictions of teenagers, to explore these dualistic spaces and in-betweens, “I’m constantly drawn to spaces that are forgotten about rather than in use – backrooms, waiting rooms – they carry way more magic than somewhere occupied by lots of people,” she tells me.

We meet just a few days after the release of her debut EP, Finding Melody Part 2, launched through odyXxey, an alternative platform for contemporary sound. We make our way through the busy streets of Soho in search of a rickshaw ride for the ultimate interview setup. Managing to dodge a few scammers trying to get their hands in tourists’ pockets (£100 for ten minutes?! Ugh, London…), we finally find ‘Our Guy’ who waits patiently out of shot as I photograph Charlie on the pleasure carriage, adorned with pink candy-floss fabric and neon flashing lights. It’s a dream come true. We get cosy on the rickshaw as Charlie whacks some tracks from her EP on the JBL speakers attached to the vehicle, riffing on top of the tunes with her harmonica, competing with a busker blaring out a questionable Robbie Williams cover on the pavement. “She understood the assignment,” I whisper to Billy Parker – my glamorous camera assistant – as I snap away manically on a disposable camera. This is really putting weight on the phrase ‘pics or it didn’t happen’.

I blast out audacious questions to Charlie, who obliges with dignity. Fuck-marry-kills and would-you-rathers, bringing the tone down a bit. Charlie’s tracks play softly in the background. The lyrics are emotional, speaking to the anxiety of girlhood and the need to belong. The EP fluctuates through genre, with moments sounding like screamo, others more grungey and electronic. Charlie’s approach to making refuses to be defined by discipline, working across video, performance, sculpture, music and writing, which she puts simply as “spinning a lot of plates.” Talk about a jack of all trades. Charlie tells me about her recent show at Piccalilli Gallery, which she describes as a stepping stone to ‘‘becoming extremely playful and extremely theatrical.” The inaugural show in South London explored the mechanics of circus aesthetics and distortions of reality. “I enjoy finding things that are dark in order to find its rawness and magic,” she says. “There are some interesting characters that I find with hardly any views on YouTube that end up being quintessential to a piece of work that I’m making.” Merging fantasy with eerie depictions of reality, her work plays on ideas of folklore and otherness. “I’m interested in the idea of people on the fringe. I relate to that more than anything else.”

Charlie’s world is all about the magic of misfits and uncanny realism. “I found this video on YouTube, it’s this American family inhaling helium but they sound like munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, they recite lines from Hollywood movies and the camera gets passed around between them, a bit like the Blair Witch Project,” she tells me, as she sucks on an off licence lollipop we bought on a quick vape stop. It’s bonfire night, and Charlie’s heading off to Telegraph Hill in South London, “my friends have made a bonfire and we’re going to let off a load of bangers,” she says. Distortions of reality cloaked in girlish innocence, there’s a lot more to Charlie than first meets the eye.