November 2007: A new book, ‘WALL’ five years in the making, is finished and with the binder. I expect it to be presentable early next Spring. ‘WALL’ uses letterpress images and images of letterpress that are deployed in digital printing, A full description will follow in the new year.

I am also very pleased to announce that the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress has recently completed the collection of the whole of my list of artist’s books. I would like to thank the Library and Mark Dimunation and his predecessors at the Rare Book Division for their implicit support over the years.

September 2006: Quote from ‘British Art, a walk round the rusty pier’ by Julian Freeman, Southbank Publishing:

From 1975 … Ken Campbell (has written) and illustrated twenty books, extended poems, hand-printed and published in limited editions, set against, and increasingly within, his own images, all suffused with wordplay and meaning. The different titles transform subject-matter from myth, history, reality and every type of allegory into sensory, spiritual, sometimes knuckle-hard text. Undoubtedly, his is one of the most important, uncompromising and self-critical talents within this medium in British art today. With A Knife Romance, Campbell’s work began to integrate word and image more fully, and to use different strategies to surprise and enhance the reading and viewing process. Divorced from their parent books, the beauty of Campbell’s individual printed pages renders them compelling, enigmatic artworks: their visual differences, evident in their individual, cannibalised base-boards, begin to do the rest, and as often deploy computer technology in their evolution as found artefacts of all kinds. From p216 on…

In between, an altogether different artefact offers future possibilities: the artist’s book. Sculptural, yet not a sculpture, three-dimensional, and still capable of unfolding in alternative ways, by individuals or in coalition, the handmade, hand-printed, constructed, and not-necessarily-too-de-luxe text has come a very long way since William Morris. In tactile terms the elasticity of The Word offers massive potential in conventional hard and soft format, and can combine with photographic and three-dimensional media to make narrative something that earlier generations of scribes and printers could never have envisaged. At the top end of such activity are artists such as Ken Campbell, whose breadth of vision and activity, as a painter, poet, sculptor and letterpress printer, combine rich sources of imagery to transform the act of turning the pages into something unnerving, often terrifying, spiritual, in the sense that, in the course of his texts, running backwards and forwards, often interlacing ideas and changing forms with colour and type, the future is both tantalising and fraught with possibility. All this is a long, long way from Kandinsky, and it needs to be, but we still need to have travelled to gain something from expressions such as Campbell’s books, and those by others like him. From them, new possibilities emerge for human responses to things, to matters, to experiences that we suppose to be beyond our grasp, but which are in fact much nearer to hand than we may think. p156 on…

April 2006. Ken Campbell’s archive of proofs, printing formes, dummy books, and supporting material has been donated to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, where (along with the New York Public Library and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany) a complete set of his books reside. Enquiries about the archive should be directed to Elisabeth Fairman, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale Center for British Art.

This site now incorporates a description, review and some illustrations of the latest book, ‘DOMINION’.

For queries about the books, or more illustrations, or to get onto my emailing list, email me at:

ken@brokenrules.co.uk

Ken Campbell November 2007

A few images from the book in progress

Unknown Too