Barbara Campbell Thomas
Barbara.campbell.thomas@gmail.com
Carraig-na-gCat (Ireland)
Why and how I make art + my motivation to apply for a residency @ Carraig-na-gCat (Ireland)
Most mornings, I tie on a pair of worn sneakers, fill a water bottle and make my way to the web of rural back roads near my North Carolina home and studio. I inhale. I exhale. I walk. As my footfalls become rhythmic, I note bodily 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 have learned 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 tunes me, preparing 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 and 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 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 while walking 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.
I am applying to Carraig-na-gCat because the residency will offer immense nourishment; the simplicity of the living space in concert with the surrounding stunning beauty of the land will facilitate deep movement into my work’s conversation between place, presence/movement and the landscape of making. I would like to come to the residency and spend days filling myself up through walking, looking, reading, writing, drawing, making collages, and possibly (and with excitement) new experimentation with making completely textile-based work.
BARBARA CAMPBELL THOMAS (SHORT) CV
SELECTED SOLO AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2027 Flowers of the Sky, Susquehanna Museum of Art, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (upcoming)
2025 Housetop, Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina
2024 Painting for a Space, Kinhouse Gallery, Fort Wayne, Indiana (two-person with Katie Davis)
2024 Painting for a Space, Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio (two-person with Katie Davis)
2024 Influence + Conversation, Les Yeux du Monde Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia (two-person with Isabelle Abbot)
2024 Heart of Space, Studio Break Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
2024 Geochroma, James May Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (two-person with Amy Sacksteder)
2023 Edna’s Diamonds, Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina
2021 Rhythms for Transport, Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina
2020 Pneuma, Ruffin Gallery, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
2019 Thisness, The Painting Center, New York, New York
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 Needle and Thread: Contemporary Textiles at Play, TAG Gallery, High Point, North Carolina
2025 Summer Lovin', Wavelength Space, Chattanooga, Tennessee
2023 Tightly Knit, Loose Fit, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY
2023 Elemental Edifices, Wavelength Space, Chattanooga, Tennessee
2023 Charm Phase, Maake Projects, State College, Pennsylvania
2023 18, Janice Charach Gallery, Detroit, Michigan
2022 Painting at Night, Collar Works, Troy, New York
2021 Amplify, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, Virginia
2021 The Printmakers Left, Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville, Virginia
2020 Front Burner: Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting, North Carolina
Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
2020 Escapes and Revelations: NC Artists Fellows Exhibit, Southeastern Center for
Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
SELECTED RESIDENCIES
2025 Kinhouse Artist Residency, Fort Wayne, Indiana
2023 Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Mount St. Angelo, Virginia
2021 Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Granville, New York
2011 Hambidge Center for the Arts, Rabun Gap, Georgia
2009 Hambidge Center for the Arts, Rabun Gap, Georgia
2008 Hambidge Center for the Arts, Rabun Gap, Georgia
2000 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine
SELECTED GRANTS, AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2020 Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency 2020 Fellow
2018 North Carolina Arts Council Artists Fellowship
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
City of Raleigh Municipal Art Collection, Raleigh, North Carolina
Images of work below
1. Housetop Two, 2025, acrylic & collage on pieced & sewn fabric and canvas, 60"x60"
2. Housetop One, 2025, acrylic & collage on pieced & sewn fabric and canvas, 60"x60"
3. Tamaqua, 2025, acrylic & collage on pieced & sewn fabric and canvas, 36"x36"
4. Detail of “Tamaqua,” to show painting texture, detail approximately 8”x8”
5. Circling the Square, 2025, acrylic & collage on pieced & sewn fabric and canvas, 48"x48"
6. Yes Two, 2025, acrylic & collage on pieced & sewn fabric and canvas, 18"x18"
7. Small Talk, 2024, acrylic paint and collage on pieced and machine stitched fabric, 12"x12"
8. Night Space, 2024, acrylic paint and collage on pieced and machine stitched fabric, 48"x60"
9. Dear Star, 2024, acrylic paint and collage on pieced and machine stitched fabric, 36"x36"
10. Central Medallion, 2024, acrylic paint and collage on pieced and machine stitched fabric, 36"x36"