Tom Campbell
About the work
Tom Campbell traces muscle memories across history from Scottish kings and Sabahan chiefs to embed them through large-scale textile installations, poetry and performance. For the Canberra Art Biennial Tom will present a newly-commissioned series of archways at the National Arboretum, structures which invite the viewer to consider their own psychic or physical connections between places here and elsewhere.
Photo credit Cathy Zhang.
Images
About the artist
Tom Campbell is an artist and writer whose work traces muscle memories across his Kadazan/Scottish lineages, through textiles and poetry. He spent close to a decade working in fundraising and philanthropy, for organisations such as the National Gallery of Australia, GetUp, the Greens, Climate Council, and the Environmental Defenders Office. He is currently General Manager, pvi collective.
His practice is often poetic, humorous, and elusive, collapsing distance across time and space between ancestors, collaborators, and influences. His work to be both free and safe was commissioned for the 2024 Canberra Art Biennial and created in collaboration with artists Joanne Leong (Gadigal nura/sydney) and Esther Carlin (Brussels/Naarm/melbourne).
Tom is also working with artists Zora Pang (Kamberri/canberra) and Jessica Tanto (Naarm/melbourne) on how to disagree, a longform project exploring the embodiment of disagreement, which received seed funding support thanks to Ainslie Gorman Live Art Lab in 2021 and has been supported by You Are Here Canberra since 2022.
- To Be Both Free And Safe
- 2024
- Installation