Skip to main content

Dressing Above Your Station – Fashion and Textiles in the Life and Work of the Artist Steven Campbell

If clothes maketh the man – and woman - chances are they also maketh the artist that springs forth from such wilfully individual sartorial felicities. This was certainly the case with Steven Campbell, whose death in 2007 aged fifty-four left behind a body of work embodied by tweedy romantics occupying extravagant dreamscapes that all but burst through the frame in their desire to make a world of one’s own.

 The importance of clothes to Campbell is unwrapped in this online promenade through the fabric of his life and work, curated by fashion historian Mairi MacKenzie and fashion designer Beca Lipscombe. Their hi-tech rendering is produced by Glasgow based curatorial organisation, Panel, and developed in partnership with digital media designers ISODESIGN and artist Rob Kennedy in a presentation by Tramway, Glasgow. 

 

With Campbell’s wife Carol talking us through the couple’s life together, as they sashay through early days at Glasgow School of Art, through to success in New York, before making a prodigal’s return to Scotland, the idyll of their homeland intact, this makes for a deeply personal visual and aural memoir.

 

Campbell cuts a dash throughout, self-made in his own image, from vintage flying suit to Comme des Garcons, to Che Guevara beret, before posing for Lord Snowdon like the laird of the manor close to his and Carol’s Kilsyth home.

 

As the exhibition’s title implies, class is important here. Campbell’s personal and artistic revolt into style and sense of reinvention was sired during an era when fashion was at the vanguard of a post-punk revolution spearheaded by autodidacts like him. Dressing up was a political act of self-expression as much as an artistic one, and making a statement was everything. 

 

As Campbell found success in the aspirational 1980s, the vogue for vintage junkshop elegance may have moved into the designer age, but the attitude remained. This is confirmed by family photos, in which a fearlessly flamboyant Campbell is flanked by the couple’s mortified looking children.

 

As the sound of Carol Campbell’s every tenderly related anecdote makes clear, this is also a love story. Listen to the way she talks about Lady with Palette Hat and Hound, Portrait of Carol (1982), painted as a gift to her.

 

Campbell waits until the end, however, before revealing the roots of their relationship on an unlikely bus trip to Ostend. With the pair already seeking worlds beyond their own front door, their youthful kindred spirithood is immortalised here in photo booth black and white. The life that followed is summed up best when Carol quotes Steven’s description of her during a radio interview with journalist Edi Stark. “My guide. My love,” he called her. Words to treasure in this intimate tour through the great adventure they shared.

 

Dressing Above Your Station – Fashion and Textiles in the Life and Work of the Artist Steven Campbell can be viewed at dressingaboveyourstation.com/ until June 26th.


Scottish Art News, May 2022

 

ends

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more