Fine Art Photography Glasgow School of Fine Art

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
ella-jo@sunrise.ch
e.campbell3@student.gsa.ac.uk
Artist Website: ellajosephinephoto.com
Instagram: @ellajocampbell
Vimeo
Works
Wood Sprite – Short Film
Human Cave – Installation
Wood Sprite – Photographs
Alternative Degree Show

Wood Sprite – Short Film

Warning: Contains Flashing Lights

Wood Sprite

The short film ‘Wood Sprite’ utilises video and stop-motion, as well as performing techniques from marionette to shadow puppetry and life-size, embodied puppets. In the form of a tale, it depicts the origin journey of a wooden puppet to the forest. The sentient woods absorb this being into the night, allowing her and the puppeteer, in a mirroring game, into a realm of dissolution of all forms, matter and spirit. This film honours the union of nature and culture, and the porosity attuning human and more-than-human creatures, at a time where the stillness of the theatre stage forces us to enquire outwards – or, truly, inwards. Fabrication, Puppeteering ; Filmmaking | Ella Josephine Campbell Pine Sprite Performance and Dance | Solene Schnuriger & Ella Josephine Campbell Music | ‘ I’ll Read You a Story ’ by Colleen, Written by Cecile Schot (SACEM), Used Courtesy of Cecile Schot.

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’.

human cave 1

Human Cave 2

Human Cave Inhabited

Human Cave Faces

Human Cave Interior

Human Cave 3

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.

Treehead

Pine Sprite 1

Pine Sprite Kaleidoscope 1

Pine Sprite Kaleidoscope 2

Pine Sprite Dance

Wooden Teen, Hibernation

Shadow Puppetry

Overgrowth Blossom

Overgrowth Shadow 1

Lungs

Ice Sprites

Vertebrae

Alternative Degree Show

Alternative Degree Show

altdegreeshowposter

Part 2, opening on July 7, features 2021 Fine Art Photography and Painting and Printmaking, as well as 2020 Fine Art graduates.