Artist Statement
Emily Jane Campbell is an artist whose fundamental concerns are the concepts of personal mythology, “genius loci”, loss and alternate realities. She investigates both the deeply personal experiences of remembrance and storytelling, and the underlying structure of the physical world. This exploration is consolidated through immaculately rendered stones, obscuration of the painted surface, a deep understanding of light and colour and the playful application of fittings and hardware. The borrowed imagery and ceremony of henges, cairns and totemic memorial constructions provide the context for fantastical landscapes populated with portals and humming neon gateways to one's own inaccessible past.
Campbell predominantly works in oil paint and mixed media. Her fantastical landscapes are an amalgamation of photographs, childhood memories and imagination. Locations of her past are reimagined, allowing her to re-author and mythologise her history and memorialise that which has been lost.
These idealised locations are treasured but inaccessible spaces. Flueorescent portals and hovering dark holes lead curiously in and out of the landscape, but their destinations remain elusive. Natural forms hold vigil. Trees are reassuring in their solidity and solidarity. The presence of stones signifies loss, as they become the cairns and totems of memorial. They reference an awareness of our place in the human story & the layers of history held in their geological strata, reminders that nothing lasts forever. Just as remnants of the past are concealed in rocks, trace elements of a person, place or happening are locked in our memory.
Artist Biography
Emily Jane Campbell (b.1986) lives and works in London. She is an alumna of University College London (BA Hons History of Art) and Goldsmiths UoL (PGCE Art and Design). Her work explores remembrance, personal mythologies and the “genius loci” or (spirit of place) through reimagined landscapes and natural forms. In 2023 Campbell won the Chapel Arts Studios CAS OPEN OPEN Solo Award and she will deliver her second solo exhibition in February 2024. “Fatherland”, Campbell’s first solo exhibition, was held at Geddes Gallery in Kings Cross in 2016. She was awarded the Cass Art Bursary Prize in 2015.
Selected exhibitions include: “CAS OPEN OPEN” Chapel Arts Studios, Andover (2023); “The Immaculate Dream” Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2019); “And Don’t The Kids Just Love It…” Goldsmiths UoL, London (2017); “The Thames: The ARTery of London” (with Plastic Propaganda) St Katharine Docks, London (2016), “Cyprus Open Studios Annual Exhibition” Technopolis 20 Cultural Centre, Paphos, Cyprus (2016); “Both Ends of Madness” (with Plastic Propaganda) Folkestone Library, Kent (2016); “Visions” Hoxton Arches, London (2015); “Co,ord.in,ate” Pop-Up Gallery, Kings Cross, London (2013). Campbell’s work is held in private collections in Europe and the US.