ARCHIE CAMPBELL: Saturnine Hats and Other Titanic Failures

I recently completed an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London. During the course my practice expanded dramatically. Now I greedily produce sculpture, drawing, video and painting in a desperate bid to realise an idea. I find a range of media allows me to observe different facets of a concept and engage with my references in a more complete way. I can bring comedy to classical 'brown' oil painting, and treat serious topics with less respect than they are used to. 

I can undermine with flimsy sculptures on fancy pedestals and revere the quotidian. My work centres on how we try to protect ourselves from that which we fear, on the tragicomic fantasies we construct to fool ourselves into believing in the possibility of a life without pain. It’s a critique accepted ‘bullshit’: ideology, power structures, superficial claims of importance or infallibility. My work uses humour and the absurd as a mechanism to explore the tragic search for solutions to unsolvable problems, an inadequate attempt at calming the existential angst.

Oil paint and packing tape - they have a certain echo. The work in this series reverberates with humanity's history of attempted head protection, to keep both bats and bats away from the belfry. Armour is fearful, and I try to reflect that fear in all of the pieces of this presentation. The work shows a semi-fictional character, terrified of pain and obsessed with insulating himself against the inevitable. Expedient materials become the hardened steel of the helmet and the quarried blocks of the citadel. Idiom and aphorism become time worn wisdom, to ignore it would be life threatening. These weighty attempts become comically absurd as the materials fail - tape dries out and flakes, and tin foil dents in a stiff breeze. 

Old Masters become new sources of fear; Saturn eating his kids is a real problem when Goya paints it, one in urgent need of a remedy. These works attempt to recognise humanity in collective crisis. Between myth, art, history and the relatable mundane there's something that interests me. Something relatable, at least a bit, to everyone. Unknown to hubristic portrait sitters with gleaming helms and fancy trousers, pain is inevitable, to seek to avoid it is quixotic tragedy, and cathartic comedy.