A walk around the rusty pier
Discussion by Julian Freeman
From British Art, a walk around the rusty pier, London
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.
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.