1994, Exhibition, Beardsmore Gallery, London

A catalogue essay by Brian Catling
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art Oxford University

Ink Shrines

"All is foreseen and freewill is given
and the world is judged by goodness,
and all is according to the amount of work."
Rabbi Akiba

The richness of Ken Campbell's imagery and the stampedal energy of it's language, seems disjointed and foreign to contemporary flows and trickles found in both literature and the visual arts. He is not taking a stance or adopting an heroic posture of independence. He is simply engaged on another quest. The complex and potent body of work that he is constructing is a power-stream of question, confrontation and reflection. Its shifting forms insisting on a robust beauty that is bred through clarity and skill, steered and directed by a generous action of revilement. These are layered works of celebration, not of a thing or a single idea but of the expressive labyrinthine landscape of a being. Such a place is not bathed on continual light. We are equally invited to find ourselves in the comic shadows.

Campbell's dark humour is lexically entwined with his passion for, and his need to articulate knowledge. This is the magnetised core that is both com- pass and engine to his original talent. It's radiating influence will attract wild and enigmatic fragments of human belief and action : foible and inspirational vision equally cluster. The processing of these is an act of becoming. The imagination sharing it's ghost-blood of kinship. A direct permeable fusion making instinct the filter of gnosis so that a vast range of subjects can be distilled to a vivid directable tincture.This is along way from the anaemic academic corrals, (which Campbell knows and treats with a healthy disrespect and curiosity), that must pen and break-in these furies before they can perceive them.

Campbell has been stealthily circling the realised image for a number of years. Experimenting with renegade assaults into etching and painting and returning to re-invent himself and the letterpress printshop; to convert it's previous rigidity, to redirect it's inks through a different philosophic heart. He has long since burnt off all the remnants of his apprenticeship to one-dimensional space. The methodical training giving him forms and signs to re-shape and sharpen for use in a greater endeavour.

The exposure of process as a silent parable runs through many of the books. The distance of the techniques being thrown into violent juxtaposition to the intimacy of the subjects and vice versa. The relationship between form and content being exchanged so that dominance is never given comfortably to the word.

In contrast to the encapsulated night pearls of books like 'Nightfeet on earth', 'Father's Garden', 'Firedogs', and now 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan'; are a group of books and sculptures that refuse the sumptuous opalescent conclusion to confront the viewer with a raw image. They are grit-visioned works that stand vulnerable and unpredictably tense in our nervous speculation.

'A Knife Romance' and 'Bibliophagy' see the book as auto-cannibal cause and effect being generated in an uncomfortable parallel to destruction and crime. 'Knife Romance' contains it's own wound in the image of it's aggressor; the print of a sheath knife being sectioned through it's pages. The concealed threat inverting an ambivalent anxious maleness.

Many of Campbell's sculptures are extended books pursuing opposite poles of their evolution. Their existence and phenomena in psychological space is prime; some hiding, some enfolding space through focus. 'A M O R O M A' hangs like a painfully hooked door before us, it's pellicle paper body stretched and defenceless. The discomfort is amplified by three static bronze hooves that squat arrogantly beneath it. This hybrid creature of frailty and material anger has it's name translucently scarred into it's impossible body. A signature of hope and terror in a species that wants to engage our attention and pity.

The quintessential mass of Campbell's work is formed by series of stunningly succulent and complex books. I bring them together in one focus so that the perception and conclusion can be clearly seen. The subjects and physical structures vary greatly but they share a perfection of visual language. The pages hold the text locked deep in their deceptive surface. The unfolding and reading being impossible without the viewer's immersion. We have to enter this visual chant that is constructed by revealment and absorption and engage in the moving specific gravity of the text in this shifting colour-field of fierce sensuality. The printing process itself has been transformed. There is no sense of a touch of ink mechanically applied to the surface of the paper. Indeed the passivity of the material has been denounced.

The saturation of each page suggests that it has been composed of a compression of pure colour and voice bound in a muscular and solid ink. The page is straining to become a thing, absolute, and it's sequacity is inverting to object.

In this deep and complex pool we find our own reflection mesmerically entangled. The turning of the book giving tidal shifts to our emotional and intellectual buoyancy. These books are icons. Closed forms that threaten us with their opening. Embedded explosions, portable visual shrines that possess contemplative resonance. The parallel to abstract expressionist painting is obvious. The sublime brooding of these works is very close to Rothko, but Campbell's reverie is not so calm. Tranquillity for him is a constant humming hue, a shifting periphery. His field is never entirely abstract. It is often occupied the unnerving static of past event. The new book made with David King, 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan', is haunted by erased personalities. The incandescent bruised mirrors of it's pages contain portraits of violent absence. Russian shadow-icons that cannot be kissed or blessed.

The vision that Campbell offers us through his majestic and compacted works is triggered, so that layers of meaning are unfolded in our memory and imagination. The full effect of it's brilliance illuminating the strange and diverse pathways of his journey and ours.

Brian Catling