Ella Josephine Campbell is a Swiss-French artist who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. For her Honours work, the installation Human Cave (2021) and the short film Wood Sprite (2021), she was awarded the Chair of Fine Art Medal and the Hunt Medal for Poetic Creativity.
Campbell’s work plays at the crossroads of visual arts and puppetry. Her practice seeks to foster dialogue, porosity or inversion between worlds; matter and spirit; the cell and the system; the organic and inorganic; humans and the more-than-human. Campbell realises site-specific, interactive and sensory installations, as well as film and performance. Alongside this work, she leads creative workshops that explore raw materials with playfulness and storytelling. Through her practice, she aspires to contribute to healing links within the triad of ecology, art and community.
Mycelium Sky explores the poetics of mycelium and its power to perform transformation, both as a system and as a material, in humans’ individual and collective spheres. Fungi have a core role in most biospheres. They perform decomposition, making space for renewal. Mycelium, fungi’s root-like structure, forms an expansive ‘intelligence’ connecting many organisms.
The hyphae, threadlike filaments structuring mycelium, generate and transmit information through their branch formations. Their tips produce electrical current as they forage and transfer nutrients. Mycelium’s potential is increasingly researched in new areas (beyond nutrition and medicine) such as architecture, wearables, and the biodegradation of pollutants.
People will find an immersive shelter here, to be experienced both from outside and inside. Cellulose threads incarnate hyphae. The human craft and the organic interweave. Fibre provides a matrix for mycelium’s growth, which benefits from disturbance. Expressions emerge across these oscillating membranes, evoking recognition, empathy and sensitivity.
What remains through disintegration? Memory, stored in constellations of threads beneath the earth. Let us conceive an inversion and allow these palpable constellations to be the firmament we look towards.
