I’ve made a showreel to launch my forthcoming 5 week online sculpture course.   Starting on 3rd August, I’ll be teaching participants how to create a nature-inspired sculpture using found and recycled materials.  

The course includes:

Weekly challenges

Step-by-step guidance at each stage

Demos

Exclusive videos and downloadable content

Online seminars

You will learn:

A range of 2-d and 3-d skills - from drawing and design to 3d wirework

Exciting ideas and techniques 

To explore different media and processes

To source and use recycled and found materials

Benefits of the course:

Work at your own pace from home

Learn in your own time

Individual advice, tutorials and one-to-one critiques

Share ideas

Learn safely 

Opportunity to connect with other participants in a friendly virtual space

Increase your confidence in creativity

Create an item for your garden or interior

After completion, you can revisit techniques

COST:

£80 incl free tools list (by 31 July)

TO ENROL:

Email: fionacampbell-art@sky.com

My Life in the Undergrowth project continues (see previous blogs).  My ritual of gardening and documenting has become a rhythm. Exploring new boundaries, free from conceptual dividing lines, drifting between gardening and art, some days are productive others more a blur.  I’ve been getting absorbed in the present, nature, looking at tiny details. Trying to surrender to the moment and allow things to just happen. 

I’m making a film which records a few of the goings on in my garden. I’ve formed a stronger bond with all that comes and goes. Sometimes this has been emotional. Strange incidents happen, stories of life and death - some have been wonderful to witness, others very sad. 

A young rook and blackbird may have died from pesticide poisoning as there have been other similar incidents locally. I watched their behaviour and subsequent deaths. I sat with the rook, left it water and worms, tried to help it, but in vain.  Slug pellets, crop pesticides and other toxic chemicals we use to deal with ‘pests’ seep into the food chain. There are countless eco-friendly ways to protect our veggies - egg shells and copper wire for slugs, marigolds for aphids, or just ‘stay with the trouble’ (Donna Haraway). The rhubarb leaves I’ve been watching decay seemed the right thing to wrap up the bodies.

I’ve approached the project as an art residency. Encounters between myself, the garden as site, and nature, without an audience, in order to gain understandings and make new connections. I’ve been interested in transformation, the entanglement of roots, worms, shoots, earth.  Aristotle called worms; ‘the intestines of the earth’. Bird communication; the vitality of nonhumans; cultivating my aloneness.  Excavating the earth, I’ve been uncovering a glut of old rusty nails, bones and ceramics. It’s been a meditative process.  I am the instrument, allowing creative energy to emerge in its own time. As I make pieces I’m aware of Donna Haraway’s words: ‘life lived along lines… a series of interlaced trails… make kin in lines of inventive connection... stir up potent response.. and rebuild quiet places’.

You can follow my Life in the Undergrowth instagram page to see the journey @life_intheundergrowth

Other news

I’ve been doing digital training via Creativity Works, which has been a great help. It’s a long, windy road but I’m on it!

This week I drove to London to collect Glut from the Royal Society of Sculptors Gilbert Bayes Award Winners Exhibition - finally over after its extended lockdown.  At the same time, I delivered Accretion for the RSS Summer Show, opening 13 July. It was the first time I’d worn a facemask for covid protection - a requirement for de-installation. I made my own - hand dyed (with avocado pits), hand painted and hand sewn. I thought a pangolin made an appropriate statement about the origins of covid19 and the wildlife/meat trades in China, which I abhor.

Huge thanks to Arts Council England and National Lottery UK for the Emergency Response Fund enabling me the time to be creative and develop skills.  Thanks also to Richard Tomlinson (Ignite Somerset), Jack Offord, Jack Robson, Dave Cable, Caroline Bond, Duncan Simey, John Taylor, 35 mil, S-J White, Jason King, Juliet Lawn, Jennifer Moyes and Carrie Grainger for some of the footage for the film (see top).