Artist Statement

“You see, I am not very good in company. I am clumsy. I am shy. … I always say the wrong thing. I upset water jugs. I am unlucky."  

—Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia 

L A U R I E   C A M P B E L L   P A N N E L L 

There is a thread that runs through my art, regardless of subject matter or medium, and that is memory. I have discovered this net spreads wide to include autobiographical and collective memory, ancestry and imagination, collecting and nostalgia, decay and dilapidation, and introversion and longing.  

I process my world through objects of memory and the stories of provenance they tell. Acts of memory and imagination—like collecting, shelling, playing with scale, ghosting images, organizing souvenirs, and archiving heirlooms—explore the relationship between objects and self.  

It is in the almost imperceptible fragment of space between remembering and forgetting that I find an incongruous juxtaposition between what happened and what is remembered. Those in-between spaces like the permeable surface of water, the porous boundary of skin, the vaporous gap between mind and body, the space of one breath between existence and nonexistence are easily pierced and difficult to protect, but I want to. My attention is captured by ordered patterns and neat rows (arranging may be my discipline of choice) interrupted by a glitch, flaw, or subtle omission—an imperfection reflecting erasure, brevity, fragility, fading memory, and impermanence.  

My work is also about words, stories, and remembered conversations, words like distance, blur, remembering, and forgetting and silly sets of words with contradictory meanings too, like emotional reasoning, benign neglect, feeling numb, and essentially useless — all words that lead to possibilities.  

Inspired by memories, I express wonder toward life. In addition, joy, imagination, quietness, solitude, and hope can be found in the multi-media artworks layered with exaggerated memories of my own. My protagonist is awkward and shy, sometimes a ham and sometimes a wallflower as the work involves playfulness and fantasy, childhood aesthetics both whimsical and dark, siblings and coming-of-age moments, tension and unspoken mini-traumas, the comfort of good parents, and the ache of outgrowing them, and compassion and empathy for imagined scenarios.