Artist Story: Hannah Campion

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I’m a painter whose work spans sculpture, installation, video and drawing. I also work collaboratively with Kev Howard, creating films for special events. Whether working in two or three dimensions, or in film and video, I treat it the same way – with love, curiosity, playfulness and a bit of savage cutting and material manipulation.

I was lucky to have pieces of wood to paint on from an early age – scraps from my Dad’s work as a furniture designer and maker. I still have my painting of a frog wearing a crash helmet, complete with two areas where I wasn’t happy with the kind of yellow-green I’d used. There was some odd purple paint that snuck in too. In junior school, apparently, I told my mum I wanted to be an artist. I remember making an A1 sized world wildlife book and being pleased with how the animal drawings and paintings turned out. It was fairly realistic, and in spite of already being critical of my work, I loved it.

My strongest memory from childhood, relating to my art, but especially to installations, is being a toddler, chasing people off the beach with a spade. I remember feeling annoyed that anyone would dare to encroach on ‘our’ part of the beach! I do feel territorial when making installations. They have invisible boundaries and points to activate different spaces.

I love psychology and understand the power that art and creativity can have in healing, developing, nourishing and nurturing children and adults. I wondered, after studying A-level psychology, if I ought to study psychology or art psychotherapy, rather than painting. However, I visited the painting department at Loughborough University and fell in love with the painting course and building. The huge high ceilings and open plan feel of the studios with light spilling in throughout.

My other love is swimming, and I had an early obsession with water and being under water. Loughborough was, and is, a sport orientated university. Strangely though, the swimming pools there were old and crumbly, and one campus pool was like a greenhouse with a wave machine in it – I felt like I was swimming through space with blobs flying past left, right and centre. This was a definite influence on the way I treat my paintings and installations, and the films I make with my co-conspirator Kev.

Another obsession, when I was very young, was with rainbows – Rainbow Brite, She-Ra, Care Bears, rainbow erasers, Spirograph (although I never had one), and I had several pairs of neon Bermuda shorts. I used to nick my brother’s Transformers and loved making dens, hiding, and going garden creeping (I was a tomboy). I gravitate towards the things that remind me of the sparkles, colour pops, and the kaleidoscopes I get behind my eyes. They are sometimes in front too, but that’s rarer (I suppose happily, as they’re meant to be some strange migraine).

How important is architecture, and the spaces we inhabit, socialise and work in, to you? Why is responding to a particular space important?

When I make site specific work I make a connection with the building. My fingertips trail walls and ceilings, noting nuances in textures. I think about the history of the building. For my work Painting XVIII in the 2022 ‘Jubilee’ exhibition at Vane, I thought about the late 16th century ceiling frieze, a remnant from a previous building which once stood on the spot and that is now part of the gallery space, and what it must have seen. I thought about the current 20th century building, and the changes around it that have survived, about the Dun Cow pub, the remodelling in 1961, and remnants of offices. Now the walls are as smooth as gesso, the floor as textured as cotton threads under papier-mâché but with a glistening shell of the magic grey paint that all studios, galleries, workshops and universities seem to use.

I planned, pondered, wondered, critiqued myself, talked myself out of the piece, enthused myself into the piece, panicked, and worked continuously making the shapes and cutting the vinyl. Questioning if this is real. Watching my scissors planning the lips to tiptoe around the windows. Questioning my methods. When I saw the refraction of light through the gallery windows explode into rainbows I clapped with delight.

I imagine I navigate buildings with my paintings the way you’d navigate the space if you were looking through a building snagging list. Spot all of the weird crevices (opportunities to jam artworks in), look for random screw holes, and screws to hang unsuspecting artworks on, obscure heights and angles of gaps to snaffle a sneaky hidden artwork in.

How much do you plan your installation works in advance? Do you have a fairly painterly, free flowing approach to creating your painted environments?

However flowy, floaty, delicate and sensual my installations can appear, I am usually smiling and sweating through pain, paint and planning.

Whilst installing the work at Vane recently, there was some sheer disdain at myself for using one brushstroke of untested, uncharted paint. I had used it on paper in my studio, but not on a wall. I broke my own rule. Test everything first – same environment, material and substrate.

In my time-lapse film from the installation, you can see a flurry of activity that bore witness to my panic to rub away this smear of paint. To be honest it looked like blood to me, and this elicited a primal response in me. It was not a pearl blue/red as it appears in the tube. It was red, the visceral, visual, real-life snapshot red I get from the trauma, and then the repetitive mental imagery I have had since pregnancy.

In 2019 a two-metre aluminium work fell on my leg in early pregnancy. I continued working, did a talk with Kev at MIMA in Middlesbrough that afternoon, then developed breathlessness with chest pain. I had deep vein thrombosis in my right leg, sub-massive pulmonary embolisms, 30-40 in each lung, right ventricle collapse and compromised blood flow to my heart. I was hospitalised for over two weeks and was later diagnosed with ‘sticky blood’ and a blood mutation.

My illness affects my work. More recently I had several spells of EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) therapy to help process the vivid nature of my flashbacks. My understanding is that when you’re experiencing flashbacks to unpleasant or traumatic experiences it can put your entire being back into the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ mode. I was experiencing this 5-8 times a day, every day. The EMDR pushes your vision from feeling present, taking it from the reptilian brain into the frontal cortex for processing. The EMDR removes the racing heart, pain, fear and, above all, the present tense. It pushes it back to the past, where it belongs. It worked brilliantly.

The rainbows dampen the sharpness, diffuse the edges, mix the jolts of reality and force some relief. I make and paint to ease mental and physical pain. I make work to share snippets of awe, curiosity, excitement, glee and my own rainbows of inquiry. Whilst making the rainbows, I’m dissipating darkness. Whilst painting the diffusion, I’m blending the sharpness. Whilst cutting those corners, I’m creating curves. My ‘Matisse scissor envy’ is real. I examine what I don’t want in order to explore what I do.

I play with diffusion, blending and saturation of colour. I merge one colour into the next, so one floats across the surface whilst others shimmer beneath. I like to work with surface depth and flatness, especially in my works on aluminium. There’s a point where the viewer almost gets lost in the glossy high key surface of my aluminium work, but cannot get lost because they, the viewer, are a part of the surface. I have worked with pearlescent, flip-tone, metallic car paints since the early 2000s, aware they engage a different response in the viewer.

You sometimes incorporate non-art materials in your work. Do you regard everything and anything as a possible material ready for you to employ? And do you ever recycle elements of your work and reuse them?

I use things around me and ‘magpie’ things. When I made paintings for the exhibition ‘Interspace’ at the Sandford Goudie Gallery, South Shields, in 2009, I played with the physicality of the sculptural works. I repurposed furniture saved from skips, used my own studio sofa (complete with a mouse nest), perched them precariously together, and made them look floaty and light. The titles of my works regularly reference childhood books and stories – Remarkable Rocket was one of the pieces in the show at Sandford Goudie Gallery for instance, and an earlier work was titled Willow the Wisp. There’s an element of the theatrical and sculptural to everything I do. Weight, balance, and tipping points with compositional tension.

During a residency at TAKSU gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2008, I found these shops selling fabrics and threads. From outside they looked like tiny haberdasheries, but inside they were like the TARDIS in Doctor Who, crammed floor to ceiling with delicious sensual fabrics, with floating colours and makeshift organisation.

I took materials purchased in Malaysia and used them as part of a stealth installation where I made a piece in situ at the Kotti-Shop, Berlin, in 2012 for the exhibition ‘Omnia Mea Mecum Porto: Works on Paper’. The exhibition was curated by Michael Mulvihill and Christopher Rollen. I added new materials found in the local art supplies superstore, and from smaller shops in the area. I then reused painted works on paper, materials and threads from the show in Berlin to create a window installation for the exhibition ‘Violet Beauregarde’s Gum’ at White Conduit Projects, London, in 2016.

When I was at Chelsea College of Arts, studying for my MA, there was a window ledge that I loved so much that I borrowed it for my installation as part of the 2013 exhibition ‘Honeymoon’ in the college’s Triangle Space gallery. Playing with the shadows and using trompe l’oeil was fun. I got into trouble from the curators for making an impromptu floor painting; my tutor Brian Chalkley described it as the most exciting thing that happened.

Your works exude positivity and there’s a real sense of freedom and fluidity to everything you make. Why is positivity important? Is there also a sense of escapism about your work?

I do wonder if that translates when I’m battling to pull something together. The work needs to feel effortless, but the reality of the making is quite the opposite. I am trying to capture elusive floatness: the sensation of throwing something up in the air and for that to be the actual painting.

This escapism is what allows me to switch off my anxiety and focus on the present. I feel so sad sometimes and incredibly low that I don’t want other people to feel that way, so I try to capture those snippets that help me float and cope and pour it all into my artwork.

How important have artist residencies been in developing your practice?

As I’ve already mentioned, I was awarded a residency at TAKSU, Kuala Lumpur, in 2008. I found this new cultural experience fascinating and it broadened my practice and helped my independence of work and thought. I made many friends and became confident in my ability to work anywhere, and with anyone. I also mischievously locked the gallery director out of the residency studio for a week or so to create an installation on the walls and the floors.

My friend and mentor Danny Rolph introduced me to Vane amidst talk of football, painting and the painters Laura Owens, Frank Stella and Tiepolo. In 2012 I set up home in Vane, at Commercial Union House in Newcastle, for just under a year after a nudge from the artist Michael Mulvihill. I was Vane’s first artist in residence – they were brave!

How about curating, is it something you’d like to do more of?

I find curating exhibitions a challenge, but equally fascinating. In 2009 I curated the exhibition ‘helicopter’ in partnership with Vane at St Anns Quay, Newcastle. And in 2014, I worked with Katya Sivers to curate ‘Taint’ at GRAD Gallery in London, a group show which brought together works by emerging artists from the UK and Russia. The director of GRAD, Elena Sudakova, used to sweep up and look after my floor painting, Painting II, which was included in the exhibition. And children played in it and helped me to destroy it during the show’s take-down day. I love this interaction with the work. It reminds me a bit of how Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija invites guests to eat and engage as an integral part of his work.

As part of Middlesbrough Art Weekender in 2018, I co-curated ‘Un-Named 3’ with Danny Rolph which saw 16 artists work in pairs to respond to the environment in Middlesbrough whilst ‘channelling’ the spirit of a preselected artist. I value working with artists from different backgrounds, it makes me think in new ways. I will do more. Watch this space.

You often post clips of yourself on Instagram making work. Is there a performative element to your work? Do you allow the public access to your painted installations while you are working on them or is it important that people only get to see the work once it is finished?

‘Sneaky peeks’ into other artists’ working practices on social media are brilliant – I enjoy watching the nitty gritty of how other people make their work. I like to share how I draw, paint and make my installations. I share my work on social media with some success, recently becoming a Stabilo Influencer.

I don’t mind people watching whilst I’m working on site on an installation, but I don’t want to talk. I usually stick headphones in to listen to music.

I time-lapse pretty much everything I do studio wise. I love the process of video and enjoy sharing them too. I will be doing some work with The Welding Institute (TWI) in Cambridge and Middlesbrough. It’s exciting to be able to use cutting edge materials, and painting and systems’ experiments, but I doubt I will be able to record everything there as they have top secret material experiments going on.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

My residency at Vane was one of the best experiences I have had. It gave me confidence to work independently towards a large-scale exhibition, and to do it in a timely and organised manner. This is down, in large part, to the support that Chris and Paul were able to give me, and to the trust that they had in me to produce the work. Wherever Chris and Paul go they achieve the feel of Vane. It doesn’t matter geographically, globally or metaphysically: New York, Newcastle, Gateshead or online.

‘Shift’, my solo exhibition at Vane in 2012, was reviewed by Robert Clark in the Guardian Guide. If I die tomorrow I’ll still be so happy with his quote describing my work as like “pockets of space choreographed by cut and torn painted scraps”. He said “I am reminded of the great American abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning calling himself a ‘slipping glimpser’. Campion traces perceptions on the move – it’s as if her subjects have already moved on, leaving behind multicoloured vapour traces. Her wispish works look ephemeral, vulnerable and at times almost painfully sensitive.”

After ten years of stubbornness and resolve I was awarded a place and scholarship on the MA Fine Art at Chelsea. This news was received whilst within the Vane fold. I could not have been anywhere more perfect.  All of this makes me realise how much trust Paul and Chris have bestowed in me and my work over the years. It’s humbling.

Interview by Stephen Palmer

Read more about Hannah Campion’s exhibitions at Vane.