FERN LIBERTY KALLENBACH CAMPBELL
Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell (*1995 in New York) lives and works in Halle and Berlin. She studied Communication Design at Burg Giebichenstein, where she graduated in 2021 with a focus on illustration, under the guidance of Professor Georg Barber. In 2019, she won the Art Award from the Friends of the Eye Clinic, and in 2021, she received the Giebichenstein Design Award for the best idea/concept. In 2023, she obtained her diploma in Textile Art in Professor Caroline Achaintre's class. In 2024, Fern participated in the International Work Scholarship in Los Angeles at Villa Aurora. Fern's works have been exhibited in various cities, including Berlin, Halle, Leipzig, Braunschweig, Erfurt, Prague, Moscow, Antwerp, Geneva, London, and Los Angeles.
Through textile art, Fern expresses her psyche and satirical view of her surroundings while exploring the correlation between her perceptions. Her work focuses on chaotic and painfully human scenarios, aiming to capture that moment when coexistence reaches the point of no return, when the atmosphere spirals out of control. Fern transforms her life experiences into personal narratives, blurring the lines between good and evil, as well as between control, chaos, and harmony. The dining table is a recurring element in her work. Fern explores her personal and digital realities, working with techniques such as tufting, sewing, painting, textile applications, and weaving. She values the speed and passion these techniques allow her to apply, creating lines, structures, and shapes intuitively, spontaneously, and freely in her murals.
''...As if layering frames of a movie into each other, Campbell creates dense, rich images that
capture the sense of simultaneity, where colors represent volume, as in the level of sound,and
different materials and textures denote temporality. The inherent warmth of textiles softens the
rough edges, making even the unsettling strangely appealing.In a way, her tapestries are like a
nonlinear comic strip, where color is as much a main character as the figures that haphazardly
pop in and out of the frame. And depending on how you look at them, they can appear perfect,
chaotic, or perfectly chaotic.’’ (Ksenia Jakobson)
