Statement

This is not your grandmother’s needlework.
This is large scale translucent tapestry made with craft yarn on an open weave that’s as big as the trees.
This is Kris Campbell Art.

I grew up in a family of flower bulb growers. My thanksgiving dinners were arguments over what was the best white tulip. These arguments would keep all the men up until the early morning hours. It was a business, a means to an end for them. I grew up with the bulbs - the oniony things. It was such a pleasure to see them in bloom - not by one or two or in a bouquet on my table - to be surrounded by hundreds of them bobbing red, or a field of weaving and swaying yellow. I could feel the color.

My grandmother was a textile artist in Rotterdam after the war. Upon her death, I received the contents of her studio. This consisted of not only the looms, spinning wheels and all the hand dyed wools and yarns she used regularly, but also all the embroidery floss she had accumulated too. These flosses were never used, believed to be soul-less in comparison to the richly varied options of the weaving materials. They were kept in the back of the closet to be used for children’s crafts. As her friends died, she got the back of their closet supplies too. They hated the stuff. They found it soul-less in their lack of texture and variety of color. I promptly put it in the back of my closet too.

My father had aspirations of me becoming a  doctor. At Lafayette College, I double majored in Art and Biology. I had spent hours in my studio practice after college, I delved into the images I spent hours studying and made paintings inspired by cell slides and electron microscope images. My path after college took me to Philadelphia where I worked, painted, and attended the Barnes Foundation Art Program.While learning Barnes and Dewey’s philosophies on education and art, I studied the Masters: Matisse for color, Picasso for line, Cezanne for warping space, Seurat’s for how the eye blends color, Manet’s blacks, Renoir’s pulsing color, and French Byzantine panels for color chords and composition.

My path took me back to the metro New York City Area after I applied and was accepted to  the School of Visual Arts MFA program for contemporary art. Here I learned contemporary art ideas and practices from exhibiting artists and working art critics. I was creating work using color theories of my own, using oil paints on plexiglass rather than traditional canvas, cutting and layering the sheets to create a blend of colors in space.

Cutting, grinding and shaping plexiglass can give off carcinogens. I stopped my studio practice with plexiglass because of this when I became a mother. I ended up looking in the back of my closet and found the floss from my grandmother and her fellow artists. Since it was compact, easily transportable, and very forgiving of the constant start and stop that motherhood demanded, I could work on images and color ideas. It was the back of the pieces I ended up showing. I fell in love with the floss for the same reason it was rejected earlier. It was smooth and consistent - so much like the phone and tv screens I found my images and inspiration through.

The work has three stages: curating, creating, displaying.

Curating: picking the image. It starts with a feeling.then finding an image that captures that feeling. Then that image clarifies the feeling and I find another image, or manipulate the image.  It takes as much time to curate an image as it does to make the final piece. There is a lot of work done on the computer. It is a modern art tool. I use Photoshop and a program that converts images to cross stitch patterns. I work alot between the two as the programs interpret color differently. The composition of the piece is based on the person standing in front.

Creating: I use one type of yarn so that there final piece has a feeling of a phone screen: smooth and unvariegated. There is a map printed out from the computer. It can have up to 40 pages for a large piece. Each square is given a color icon. There is a map key that shows the icon and the color. The netting is rolled on a rod at eye level that hangs across my studio. I work on a 3 foot section. As I work, I roll the netting up or down. This stage is about a month or two. There are places I chose to leave the stitches out so the final piece can be seen through. Some are missed and I choose to leave them out. Mistakes are made, the pattern isn’t always followed. The final pieces have hints of this too.

Displaying: Never having seen the piece in its entirety, it is taken off the rod. Then it is sprayed and treated to be outside in sections. It will get hung from my house for an initial review of the “front” for small changes. Rolled up, it is fairly easy to transport. Once on sight, hooks and hanger wire create a frame. The magic happens when the piece is hung for the first time - and the knotty side seen for the first time allows me to have a similar experience to the viewers. I get to see it for the first time too.