Launching my Online Sculpture Course and other news

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

Entangled I, 180 (w) x 110 (h) x 100 (d) cm, '20

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).

Life as a Recluse

Today is the first day of summer, so I’m celebrating with a blog focusing on nature.  I love spring - days get longer, warmer, new life unfurls and there is such beauty in blossom.  But my favourite season is summer.  I adore the sun.  It probably comes from my upbringing in Kenya.  We’ve been so lucky in UK with these blue skies, although watering the fruit and veggies has become a daily task and there is concern about the effects of drought. 

Like so many, I’ve become a recluse.  In my own home and garden I feel safe.  I am not alone, the birds and insects keep me company.  The garden, in particular, has become my world and route to wellbeing, providing me with a deep sense of peace and purpose. There’s so much to do - planting homegrown seedlings, weeding, tidying, creating a fully functioning veggie zone, and digging soil to prepare a space for an outdoor studio bay.   I’ve been selling my surplus rich topsoil to local residents (safe distancing) - a circular economy!  The veggies are coming on nicely. I don't want to use chemical pest control, so have put down copper rings around my raised tyre beds and planted marigolds to keep the aphids off my beans!  The other day I spent hours watching a baby tit in the garden. At one point I thought the neighbour's cat had got it, long story but after an emotional blub, I was overjoyed to find it safe.

Creativity must happen too.  My garden feeds my art and art feeds my garden.  This has formed my self-directed project Life in the Undergrowth.  I’ve been particularly inspired by upturned turf, roots, worms and shoots.  I’ve made drawing tools from natural materials, and a series of maquettes and larger sculptural works are developing.  I was very fortunate to receive Arts Council England Emergency funding so am looking forward to purchasing a micro lens among other useful technical aids to document my discoveries.  I’m allowing the project to evolve organically.

I have appreciated my studio at home.   I’m doing some digital training to broaden the scope of my work.  I’ve started to embed video documentation in my practice, one of the outcomes of lockdown.  Videos attract more traffic on social media, improving audience and networks, though they usually take longer to create.

This covid19 period has made me realise that much of my travel is unnecessary, costly, polluting, stressful and time-consuming.  I will enjoy visiting exhibitions in the future, but make a greater effort to utilise travel and only make journeys that are necessary. Covid19 has catalysed an urgent need to adapt to the growing requirement for online creative provision and engagement.   I completed my online teaching course and will soon be launching my own online course.  Please pass on my details to anyone you think would be interested and suggest they subscribe to my website to hear more. I will be offering a free giveaway as part of the launch!  I think online courses will become more popular in the future.  Advantages of convenience, flexibility, extended reach, instant access, no travel means digital engagement is a sustainable way forward.

I’ve shared my free video resources on BBC’s Get Creative at Home and taken part in the following online art initiatives this past month: shareyoursky - Pound Arts; #artistsupportpledge (sold Mini Dung Beetle and Ball!); RSS Sculptors at Home; RSS #10gramchallenge; 44AD Gallery’s online exhibition A-Z - Between & Enveloped; Anna Souter’s Vegetate; SAW’s Somerset Reacquainted.

Root-inspired piece for 10 gram challenge. This will be cast in bronze at the Milwyn Foundry.

I was interviewed by Art Tour International.  Here’s a link to .the recorded Facebook Live interview with Viviana Puello, based in New York.

Safe distance walks and meet-ups will become more frequent, but I hope the new normal won’t be like it was and that we heed nature’s big message.  

A massive thank you to all of you who have given me and my work so much support! Here’s to nature, summer and happy times ahead! 

Testing Time

While we’re all learning how to live differently during this terrible pandemic - a worrying time for humanity - I’m trying to find positives in all this instability.  It will undoubtedly change the world - let’s hope, in many ways for better.  

On a micro scale, artists are having to re-adjust our practices and finances after cancelled projects and exhibitions.  For me, a large amount of prep for future work may be wasted; several shows, public commissions and freelance workshops are now cancelled.  Our Royal Society of Sculptors Gilbert Bayes Award Winners Show couldn’t tour to Grizedale and my latest piece Pyre - charred bundles of treasured finds created in response to wildfires - is in a ghost exhibition Incendiary.  At least we managed to install, so it can be viewed digitally!

Pyre, 2020, 90 x 115 cms aprx. Photos above and below by Stephen Lenthall

On the upside, last week, completely unexpectedly, I was delighted to hear I’ve won the Red Line Art Works Award for my series of works Snakes and Ladders (created for B-Wing), Glut and Accretion!  My trophy’s arrived in the post and I am extremely grateful to Red Line Art Works for the award - it comes at a timely moment.  Red Line Art Works is an international organisation reflecting on global issues, the state of our world and global justice. ‘Our global audience is inspired by art with a conscience, art that reflects these big problems’.

David Attenborough recently said in an interview with Big Issue ‘In times of crisis, the natural world is a source of both joy and solace... we are part of the natural world.  If we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.’  Ironically, in this crisis nature continues, bird song seems louder and new life is bursting out everywhere. The message is profound.  To re-focus and make sense of things, I’m taking life at a slower pace.  I’ve been spending time gardening, appreciating what I have, sowing veggie seeds, mending, sketching, tentatively picking up loose ends and attempting new approaches in work.  I’ve collected plant debris for hand-made paper and fibre works, and made dye from avocado pits. I gave my first Zoom live-stream artist talk online (recorded), in conversation with Richard Tomlinson and interactive viewers. It was part of Ignite Somerset's monthly Creative Network sessions.  I’m also producing a series of simple art project slideshows that can be used by all ages (watch this space!)  The savings in travel are great for the pocket and the environment.  The sky has far fewer vapour trails.  I’m in awe of hospital workers, all the committed carers, community support, and the creative resilience of artists.  Through virtual chat we can still make connections and I’m finding this crisis brings us closer.  

At the bottom of this blog, I’ve pictured a few of my artworks currently available for sale.  Some of these (under £200) I am selling as part of #artistsupportpledge - an initiative by Matt Burrows to foster generosity and support among artists. My instagram details these artworks. Please contact me if you need further information.

Creativity Works posted 5 ways to wellbeing: connect, keep learning, be active, take notice and give.  I’m trying to embed these in my routine.

In an essay ‘Against Interpretation’ by Susan Sontag, she says our ‘culture based on excess.. overproduction… material plenitude… crowdedness… dulls our sensory faculties…  We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’.  And that was in 1964!

Look after yourselves in this testing time and let’s hope we learn many lessons in the process!

Prices range from £60 - £1950 + p&p

Drawing on Dorset, quality paperback book, £15 + p&p

Live-stream In-Conversation

As part of Ignite Somerset’s Creative Network sessions, I will be presenting an online slideshow of my work and joining Richard Tomlinson in-conversation, via a live-stream channel on  Facebook page, today, Wednesday 25th March, 5pm. The switch to online is due to Covid19.

We’ll be inviting participation and comments from the public - hope you can join in!