Artist of the Month is a feature where we put the spotlight on the incredible work of one of our members.
Our Artist of the Month for September is Delphi Campbell!
Delphi will also be the guest for September's Cwrdd event on Tuesday 2 September, open to all members. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtdumupz4sGNLwmSzZdjlFUH4av1PfzesP#/registration
Delphi Campbell is a multidisciplinary sculptor, whose practice is rooted in (soft) self-portraiture, and a graduate of Cardiff Metropolitan’s School of Art and Design and The Ruskin.
Delphi’s relationship with chronic illness is at the core of her work. The objects she produces map out each facet of her being, ranging from clinical diagnoses to favourite TV shows. Campbell’s practice reflects a life lived on an intersection; the raw and ravaging experiences of being a self-proclaimed crippled, mad and queer woman, alongside the unbridled joy and love that exists in these identities.
Sickness and queerness align, allowing Delphi to embrace multiple illnesses in the form of what superficially appears as fun and frivolous, but is a more radical challenge in confronting the narrative of living in an othered body, and ideas of being 'normal'.
Campbell's first solo show, opening September 28th at Cardiff MADE, dives into her lived experiences; expressions of memories, body and mind are translated into individually crafted elements formed into a giant tactile nest, a fleshy, pink iteration which forms more than the sum of their parts. The work’s queer and camp sensibility provides a bright and celebratory take on being disabled, one that makes friends with her pain, like a bright sparkly offer; it is a joyous grasping of her situation that is radical, brave, and most definitely necessary.
Working from drawings Campbell creates 3D soft sculptural panels, which reflect the unique characteristics of each of her specific conditions. The starting point, being her own medical micrographs - photographs taken through a microscope, which are then interpreted in 3D, using recycled clothing, mosaic, fake fur and a lot of ingenuity. With the colours turned up, like a pop up exploded self, her insides are literally made flesh, each texture becoming a friendly equivalent of degenerating or inflamed parts of her body at a cellular level.
There are also paintings, 3D wall mounted objects and sculptures made of domestic furniture, where Delphi has created ‘interventions’ to become altered bodies, metamorphosed into other versions, or proxy bodies like hers - bejewelled and resplendently diseased.
" …Each ounce is imbued with a radical love for bodies. The acceptance of your body into such a space is a liberation. The body of work stems from Delphi’s physical experience of being a queer, disabled woman within a wider system which actively works to repress, exploit, silence and exploit."
-Poppy Jones-Little
Learn more about Delphi's work:
Website: https://www.delphicampbell.com/
Instagram: @delphicampbell