Melissa English Campbell
Kent, OH
Melissa English Campbell is a visual artist noted for her tapestries of woven paintings.
Message
Melissa English Campbell (b. 1969, San Francisco) is a visual artist noted for her tapestries of woven paintings. She combines old world weaving techniques with traditional painting methods to build portraits and landscapes that can move into abstraction and geometric patterning.
Melissa artwork has exhibited in 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, Society for Contemporary Craft Pittsburgh, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and internationally at the Royal Albert Museum in the UK, Seoul South Korea, Como Italy, and New South Wales Australia.
Melissa holds a B.S in Environmental Design from U.C Davis and an MFA in Studio Arts from Kent State University.
Statement
Like the abstract impressionist painters from the 1940’s I am interested in asking questions about our relationships with our social spheres and the responsibilities to our environment. Early impressionist painters and sculptors believed that abstraction in portraits and disruption of patterns could encourage mental involvement and imagination to help answer these questions. I am interested in the visual conversations this creates and in the way that abstraction and distortions can be employed to express the psychological states we experience when asking these questions.
Weaving requires the orderly movement of multiple methodical systems to transform yarn from warps and wefts into a stable structure. Painting directly onto the warp and weft yarns before the weaving starts, is how I introduce another layer of interaction and open a space for chance to weave its way into the mechanical. Layered into each piece is a network of rhythmic geometry, and a structure impacted by the rippling and feathering movement of the yarns.