Portrait of the artist in Climax, North Carolina, by Todd Turner.
Artist Bio
Barbara Campbell Thomas (b. 1975, York, Pennsylvania) is a North Carolina based painter who has exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, The Painting Center (NY), the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (NC), the North Carolina Museum of Art, Ortega Y Gasset Projects (NY), Maake Projects (PA), Wavelength Space (TN) and Hidell Brooks Gallery (NC). Barbara Campbell Thomas is currently preparing for her first museum solo exhibition, to be exhibited at the Susquehanna Museum of Art in 2027.
Her work has been written about in Two Coats of Paint, Art Papers, The Coastal Post and BURNAWAY. She has been interviewed on the following podcasts: Sound & Vision, Seamside, Studio Break, Visual Quitters and the Artist/Mother Podcast.
Barbara Campbell Thomas attended Skowhegan, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and Hambidge Center for Creative Arts. She is a Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Artist Statement
Most mornings, I tie on a pair of sneakers, fill a water bottle and make my way to the web of rural roads near my North Carolina home and studio. I inhale. I exhale. I walk. As my footfalls become rhythmic, I note changes: my thinking quiets, my ears sharpen to the crackle of grass underfoot, my eyes stop naming (tree, branch, leaf), preferring to wordlessly absorb the shifting network of line, color, pattern and shape around me. I digest visual, aural and tactile abundance through the mechanism of movement. Traversing the landscape at the slow speed of my own locomotion is simple, but the act of repeatedly returning to the land—to nature’s complexity—is instructive. I learn a new scale relative to my body, a proper scale able to hold the limits of what I perceive alongside the boundlessness of all I imagine. Every day I walk amidst a wooded tapestry of living and dying, making and unmaking. I am small in comparison; my feet touch only inches.
I consider my daily walks to be part of my studio practice. Physical movement has long activated full-bodied attentiveness and focus for me, offering a bridge from the adamantly material realm of gravity bound form to the adamantly immaterial realm of imagination, consciousness and spirit. I walk to perceive more than what I can see, so walking prepares me for studio work. Making is also physical, especially the kind of making I employ. I became a painter because I fell in love with the material of paint. But as I got older, paint was no longer enough. Now I make highly physical abstract paintings comprised of textile, collage and paint. My painting “ground” is not a passive piece of canvas attached to stretcher bars, but a dynamic, undulating landscape comprised of hundreds of pieces of fabric sewn together, built up incrementally. These handmade grounds traverse the expanse of the painting, slowly growing a surface through the accumulative act of sewing. After the ground is constructed, I pull and staple it across wooden stretcher bars. The action softens the geometry of sewn shapes, activating them like breath flowing into new lungs. The painting appears, and I add collage material recycled from discarded paintings, as well as thin veneers of paint. Paint and collage hone the work’s visual and material rhythms. The whole surface converses. A shifting material field of staccato, color-changing fragmentation emerges, conjuring wild shifts of scale—microscopic focus, aerial mapping and the big bang all at once. Walking and painting converge.
My paintings’ materiality delivers me into the kind of spaciousness I absorb in the natural world. I make paintings that embody how it feels to exist corporally and immaterially, to be a body with boundaries from which consciousness spins. The experience of being small, fallible and finite, bound to a slow-moving form that falters is a vehicle conjuring what is possible beyond those edges, what might be imagined, what could be brought into being beyond all limitation.