Chiara Camoni's exhibition - murmur, buzz, hiss and rub at Cample Line
5 October – 15 December 2024
Thurs-Sun, 11am-4pm
The exhibition will bring together over 30 works by Chiara, from the monumental to the tiny, and includes three new works - two in ceramic - made using clays, soils and plant matter from Cample and nearby villages.
Chiara is one of the foremost Italian artists of her generation, and she lives and works in the mountain village of Seravezza in Northern Tuscany, Italy.
She has said of her practice: ‘Everything stems from a personal fact – the choice to live in a village in the Apuan Alps – this has become a political choice to some extent.’
Her studio practice represents a commitment to live and work beyond major urban centres and to root the production of her sculptural work in local economies and community processes. Working with friends and family and members of her village, Camoni uses diverse materials, including raw clay, stone, flowers and plants sourced near her home, as the basis for a wide-ranging body of work that has been exhibited extensively internationally.
Chiara has recently said: ‘Much of my work originates at home or in the garden, conditioned by the weather and climate, as well as the surrounding sounds and voices.’
Georgia Massari has referred to Camoni’s work as ‘a dance between ancient knowledge and everyday knowledge, in which nature plays a prominent role.’
Her works combine vernacular, archaic and ancestral forms, often collapsing the boundaries between the human and more-than-human. These concerns have coalesced in her Sister series (2017 onwards) in particular – monumental female divinities, made with thousands of small pieces of hand-molded terracotta, that assume varying zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms.
Of the Sisters, Chiara has said: ‘they are female figures, but I would say that they encompass a little bit of everything…the masculine, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral…Each has its own bearing, has its own attitude and they ask us for a relationship.’
Chiara has described her exhibitions as assemblies or gatherings of eyes, of figures, of presences, of animals, of insects – ‘some visible right away, other emerging slowly.’
Her work is often attuned to more-than-human frequencies and speaks of dynamic co-presence – ‘moving in the snakes slithering low to the ground, rising in the more vertical figures, winding up and down’.
murmur, buzz, hiss and rub will invoke this world of shared and shifting energy, low hum and living inter-dependence, acknowledging and drawing upon the species richness and diversity found around Cample and as salute not only the history of human presence in the building, but to the spiders, frogs and creatures that attempt to make their home in it, or negotiate it en route to Cample Water.
5 October – 15 December 2024
Thurs-Sun, 11am-4pm
The exhibition will bring together over 30 works by Chiara, from the monumental to the tiny, and includes three new works - two in ceramic - made using clays, soils and plant matter from Cample and nearby villages.
Chiara is one of the foremost Italian artists of her generation, and she lives and works in the mountain village of Seravezza in Northern Tuscany, Italy.
She has said of her practice: ‘Everything stems from a personal fact – the choice to live in a village in the Apuan Alps – this has become a political choice to some extent.’
Her studio practice represents a commitment to live and work beyond major urban centres and to root the production of her sculptural work in local economies and community processes. Working with friends and family and members of her village, Camoni uses diverse materials, including raw clay, stone, flowers and plants sourced near her home, as the basis for a wide-ranging body of work that has been exhibited extensively internationally.
Chiara has recently said: ‘Much of my work originates at home or in the garden, conditioned by the weather and climate, as well as the surrounding sounds and voices.’
Georgia Massari has referred to Camoni’s work as ‘a dance between ancient knowledge and everyday knowledge, in which nature plays a prominent role.’
Her works combine vernacular, archaic and ancestral forms, often collapsing the boundaries between the human and more-than-human. These concerns have coalesced in her Sister series (2017 onwards) in particular – monumental female divinities, made with thousands of small pieces of hand-molded terracotta, that assume varying zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms.
Of the Sisters, Chiara has said: ‘they are female figures, but I would say that they encompass a little bit of everything…the masculine, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral…Each has its own bearing, has its own attitude and they ask us for a relationship.’
Chiara has described her exhibitions as assemblies or gatherings of eyes, of figures, of presences, of animals, of insects – ‘some visible right away, other emerging slowly.’
Her work is often attuned to more-than-human frequencies and speaks of dynamic co-presence – ‘moving in the snakes slithering low to the ground, rising in the more vertical figures, winding up and down’.
murmur, buzz, hiss and rub will invoke this world of shared and shifting energy, low hum and living inter-dependence, acknowledging and drawing upon the species richness and diversity found around Cample and as salute not only the history of human presence in the building, but to the spiders, frogs and creatures that attempt to make their home in it, or negotiate it en route to Cample Water.
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NewsTranscript
00:00My name is Tina Fiske. I'm director here at Campel Line.
00:03Campel Line is an art gallery, visual arts organisation,
00:06and we're based in the small village of Campel, just outside
00:10Thornhill in Dumfries and Galloway, where we're just about to open our autumn
00:13exhibition, which is a solo presentation by Italian
00:17artist Chiara Comoni. Chiara lives in a very small village
00:23in northern Tuscany, population about 80 people,
00:27and that's probably about the population of Campel, so it's really
00:31wonderful to have an artist here who has an
00:33international career, who chooses to live
00:36in a very small rural village, in a mountain village in northern Tuscany,
00:40rather than a large urban metropolis. The exhibition is entitled
00:44Murmur, Hum, Hiss and Rub. It's an exhibition that takes place over
00:49two floors in our building, includes approximately 20 works of art,
00:54which combine a whole different range of mediums, clay,
00:57metal, recycled metals, there's a video work,
01:01there's a large piece in wood, and there are some framed drawings as well.
01:05Chiara's practice is very special, I think,
01:09and we've been looking forward to working with her for a long time.
01:12She works with natural materials, she works with materials that she gathers
01:16around her home in northern Tuscany. The exhibition
01:21is really based around one significant or key piece, which is
01:25Sister 2023, which is behind me at the moment.
01:29Chiara describes her exhibitions really beautifully, she describes them as
01:33gatherings or assemblies of presences, beings,
01:37eyes, insects, creatures, which I think is a really wonderful way of
01:43her explaining her ethos around the human presence in nature,
01:49and the kind of co-presence, if you like, between humans and other
01:53living species. That's a really important side of her work,
01:56that she's able to bring all these different elements
02:00into her sculpture. So the exhibition itself contains,
02:04I would say, three significant presences. The sister upstairs is one of those,
02:10and that figure comprises a huge number of
02:14terracotta beads, sort of assembled around a frame,
02:17and the terracotta beads were made by Chiara in her studio with
02:22people who live in her village, her family, her friends,
02:25and also we were able to bring a group of local residents together here at
02:29Campbell, who also contributed some beads to the
02:31piece there now, in the tale of the work. Downstairs we have a large figure also
02:37called La Verene Babona, which is a piece of mimosa wood
02:41which has a sort of presence, almost like a kind of torso and set of legs,
02:46around which Chiara has strung some beads, and that piece of mimosa wood came
02:50from a tree in Chiara's garden, which had grown too tall and needed to
02:54come down. But what she learned is that mimosa wood is actually toxic when you
02:58burn it. So again, it's a sort of recycling, and
03:02this part of the show is consistent to Chiara's
03:06practice. She gathers materials from all around her
03:09home. She goes out walking every day and collects materials.
03:13That can be wood, that can be stone, that can be clay or soil
03:17or flowers. It can also be the little bits of plastic that are discarded on
03:20the ground. One of the works that we have on the
03:22ground floor is a necklace, a large five meter long necklace
03:28called Grande Sereia, number 17, which she made last year, and that comprises
03:33bits of detritus, plastic detritus, that she's found
03:37around her home and also on the nearby beach. And she brings all of that element
03:41because she says it's part of our landscape
03:43and part of the environment that we live in. So she absolutely
03:46chooses and selects things that are familiar to her world.
03:50And she also works with very familiar forms like vessels,
03:54cups and vases. In the show is a group of beautiful
03:59vases that she calls vase fafala, which is butterfly vases, and they have
04:04this sort of transformative quality about them. They're
04:07part vase, part creature, if you like. They're
04:11coil built, they're hand built, using a very, very
04:14ancient form of vessel building, but from them there are extruded
04:18antennae, ears, eyes, wings. Into those extrusions she's kind of
04:24carved little eyes, which are really beautiful. And then she
04:28always, in the vases, puts foliage so that the
04:32foliage acts as antennae as well. So you really do get this sense in the
04:36show that, and Chiara says this herself, that not
04:40only are we looking at the work, but the work is looking at us, and then
04:44the works are looking at each other. So you'll always find a sort of either
04:49a more visible sense of a sculpture having a pair of eyes or
04:54often, you know, there's things that emerge in her work that you see.
04:58Some of them are more obviously, take insect forms. There's a couple of
05:02spiders that are there that include bronze, brass, and copper.
05:07And there are a couple of beetles and moths that are more obviously those
05:11things. And then there are some forms which are
05:13a bit more kind of abstracted. You have to look a little bit harder to
05:17sort of see what they might be perhaps, but they all have this relationship to
05:21the insect world. They all have this kind of presence of
05:25little eyes, and Chiara is really fascinated with the
05:29presence of the antennae as a way to kind of sense and understand the world
05:32around you, which obviously insects use. So these little insects
05:36animate the wall. There's one or two of them which are
05:40actually wearable pieces, which are sort of like little, almost
05:43like headbands, which you can imagine the kind of
05:45antennae dropping down over you. And they're just arrayed on a single wall
05:50opposite. And so this idea of the kind of
05:54co-presence of species around Campbell, there's a really wonderful
06:00diversity of animal species. And so the building itself is generally
06:04full of spiders that we try and usher out, and
06:08particularly this time of year. So it's really wonderful to kind of have
06:11a nod to that in the show, and that sort of dynamic in the show coming
06:15through with Chiara's work. It's really special.