Steven Campbell Annual Lecture 2019, Dressing Above Your Station
Beca Lipscombe and Mairi MacKenzie look at the life and work of Steven Campbell, considering what it means to dress for the life you want rather than dress for the life you have. They reflect upon Campbell’s depiction of textiles and clothing as well as his personal wardrobe in order to recount their own aspirations growing up in Scotland and the routes they took in an attempt to develop a vernacular panache. Beca Lipscombe is a fashion and textile designer and one half of Atelier E.B. Mairi MacKenzie is a fashion historian and Research Fellow in Fashion and Textiles at Glasgow School of Art.
We take a closer work at Steven Campbell’s On Form and Fiction (1990), originally staged at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre and re-installed at the National Galleries of Scotland for GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland.
STEVEN CAMPBELL AT HOME IN HIS STUDIO.
Andi Vincent 2009. AVMUSICPRODUCTIONS.
This event was hosted on Zoom, 6-7pm, Wednesday 29 September. The Steven Campbell Trust were delighted that art historian Dr Gráinne Rice gave the 2021 Steven Campbell Trust Lecture, the tenth in the series. This talk explores Campbell’s discernible Surrealist affinities and representations of crime and violence in his work. From early work such as the 1981 collaborative performance Poised Murder, to the later 2000-02 Psycho Rugs series, Campbell’s work incorporated Surrealism’s interest in crime and the subconscious. His work synthesised ideas and imagery borrowed from artistic precursors with elements borrowed from popular culture, cinema, and literature. Rice has recently completed a PhD on Campbell at Edinburgh College of Art. The event was chaired by Leverhulme Fellow, Professor Patricia Allmer (University of Edinburgh).
Steven Campbell: Love, Tramway 2018
Love was an exhibition of twelve large scale multi-media collages made between 1988 and 1991 by Steven Campbell, one of Glasgow’s most celebrated artists. Campbell began the works on his return to Scotland in 1987 following a five year period of living and working in New York. The collages represent a little known, experimental area of Campbell’s practice which also includes clay, plaster and papier mache sculpture, drawing, printmaking and textile design. While Campbell’s paintings were often executed with terrific speed – a canvas, he claimed, could be completed in five days – these large scale, predominantly two- dimensional collages were each made over a period of weeks, in part because of the laborious way in which the artist chose to work with material (hand painting and then adhering individual strands of string rather than painting once they were integrated into the collage). However the artist’s wife Carol Campbell has also attributed this change of a pace to a need for an activity to accompany a period of reflection and contemplation, a form of therapy through which Campbell could come to terms with the changes in his life following the family’s return from America. Completed at the kitchen table, amid the rhythms of family life the resulting collages are testament to Campbell’s modest needs, his restless imagination and experimental nature but perhaps even more so to his sensitivity to the world around him. In these works we see a manifestation of the most powerful cornerstones of his life, his family, the natural world and his boundless imagination. Love was curated by Linsey Young in collaboration with Tramway. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue including a new essay by Michael Bracewell, supported by Creative Scotland.
The Steven Campbell Trust 