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:

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

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more