Ella Josephine Campbell (She/Her)

Winner
Steven Campbell Hunt Medal, Chair's Medal for Fine Art 2021, Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries: Selected Artist
My work plays at the crossroads of visual arts and puppetry.
It seeks to foster dialog, porosity or inversion between worlds; matter and spirit; the cell and the system; the organic and inorganic; humans and the more-than-human. With their agency revealed, material objects become subjects, mediators for relationships to happen. I often also practice art as a refuge, and I seek to transmit this experience. Both through the recording lens and in real time performance, the scenes I generate play on tensions between visceral bodies and oneiric worlds. Through sensory experiences, stories and instinctual movement, inspired by ritual and myth, I strive to make space for transformation.
This year’s project has enabled me to practice many processes, from 3D making and puppet fabrication involving wood, textiles and paper, all the way to performance, filmmaking and photography.
Contact

Wood Sprite – Short Film
Warning: Contains Flashing Lights
Human Cave – Installation
The Human Cave is a nomadic, site-specific and immersive installation. It embodies a spirit whose belly you can enter, and whose translucent, woven and felted skin acts as the theatre for shadow play and video projection. Its head is composed of four faces looking inwards, and roots soaring up; it is a circular being with no back or front.
In the Human Cave’s mind, addressing an ecological crisis concerning all species goes hand in hand with grasping, in perspective, what it is, and how it feels, to be human.
The visuals which are projected in this installation are partly from the short film ‘Wood Sprite’.
Wood Sprite – Photographs
A take on the Wood Sprite project through digital photography, in continuation with the short film.
All works in this series are inkjet prints, for sale, at multiple scales, in editions of 7 + 1 AP. Price range £100-£200. Please contact for more info.
An artist book featuring this project is coming soon. 30+ pages, £30, contact to pre-order.