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Website: http://www.leecampbell.org

College / University: Goldmiths

Program: M.A. Fine Art

Graduation: 30 June 2002

Member type: Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?: Conceptual, Digital, Event, Installation, Painting, Photography, Video

I am...: a non-media specific artist interested in working with people on participatory projects, collaborations, open ended investigations and interactive works. Interests: Fantasy, subjectivity, self-expression, new media, painting, drawing, assemblage, process, conceptual...

About my artwork: My work originates from speculation about the affects of fantasy culture on our selves, our bodies, our communities, and our homes. We engage in activities which seem symptomatic of these affects; role-playing, fancy dress, writing fan-fiction, visiting genre conventions, and buying posters, t-shirts, and models. We also make subtler gestures, such as wishful thinking, self delusion, hoping, and even believing.

While I am interested in fantasy as a broad genre with its own cultures (horror, sci-fi, swords and sorcery, etc...), I have become more interested in fantasy as symptom of human feeling; a key to subjectivity. While my earlier photographs compressed reality and fantasy in staged tableaux and studio portraits exploring the problems and aesthetics of ungratified needs, my recent work has become increasingly relational.

From being reinvented as a goth for Nosferattitude (a collaboration with Lorin Davies): an experiment in the commodification of expressionism, to engaging local people in participatory artwork and exploring their fantasies, I have been looking outward more than inward.

I have retained a penchant for the use of prosaic settings, bric-a-brac, and meagre materials. On the one hand these act as a counterweight to the overblown images of the media and the imagination, and yet in an art context serve an additional purpose: that of giving character and resonance to the ordinary, creating a moment somewhere between the mundane and the extraordinary.

Through my images and activities I hope to expand this moment so that everyone can live there with me. So that we can all exist at the intersection between the real and the imagined, becoming fantastic....