ARTIST STATEMENT
I combine painting techniques with fiber art processes to transform yarn, ink, and paint into pictorial wall hangings. The heavily patterned, textured, and color-rich tapestries are about resilience, breaking through pattern, adaptability, and the human capacity for wonder. Embedded in the pieces are my stories and experiences. To explore the formation and impacts of these stories, I use a weave structure called double weave and combine that structure with its opposite to make compositions of geometric patterning, figuration, and abstraction.
As a child, I lived a nomadic, multicultural, multilingual existence. At a young age, I had already lived in a commune in rural Tennessee, on a tulip farm in Holland, at a base camp in the French Alps, and in a caravan of converted school buses. Reflected in my work is the socially isolating effect this had on childhood, the rhythmic pattern of constant motion, the human desire for constancy and stability, and the equally strong desire to resist and disrupt those things. For a female child, a contradiction existed in that lifestyle, which celebrated living free and rejecting social constructs, and also in the ever- restrictive controls of socially acceptable behaviors for a growing girl. This tension of contradictions is represented in my work through the dissolution of image and pattern as they form and dissolve, creating spaces in which both presence and absence exist in the same space.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Melissa English Campbell (b. 1969, San Francisco) is a visual artist noted for her warp painted tapestries. Her process combines old world weaving techniques with traditional painting methods to invoke portraits and landscapes that balance abstract gestures and geometric patterning. Melissa has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Royal Albert Museum, Center for Contemporary Art, FiberArt International, the CAN Triennial, International Fiber Art, the New Bedford Art Museum, Museum of Texas Tech University, Yeiser Art Center, Petaluma Center for the Arts, Hand Weaving Museum New York, Troppus Gallery, Contemporary Craft Pittsburgh, the San Jose Museum of Textiles, and her work is included in multiple public and private collections. Melissa holds a B.S in Environmental Design from U.C Davis and an MFA in Studio Arts from Kent State University and is currently located in Kent, Ohio.
© Melissa English Campbell