Gemma Campbell creates drawings, prints, and installations that explore strength and vulnerability. Her work brings together images of birds, bodies, and handwriting as motifs, giving the artist a language to describe things that are hard to put into words alone: memories, feelings, and experiences. Her methods fluctuate from expressive mark making to the quiet solitude of writing and documenting. She communicates with all parts of her process, even what feels private or imperfect, to embrace vulnerability and all sides of being human. Lists, personal archives, and process materials, shape her works reflecting on the dualities of everyday life; pain and joy, fatigue and energy, awkwardness and grace. Through works rooted in the experience of being a woman with a chronic illness and trauma, the artist creates space for honesty about struggle and strength, and the ways they often exist together.
See Gemma’s as part of our annual winter open call exhibition, TRACES, showcasing works inspired by the marks that we leave in our wake: footprints in the snow, the enduring warmth of an embrace, the hollow left in the seat of your favourite armchair.
Hi Gemma! Can you walk us through your creative process?
My process usually begins with something lived rather than planned, it’s the direct result of an emotion or memory. I move between automatic writing and drawing, often on a large scale, treating the page as a place to pour out thoughts until they become almost unreadable marks. Usually from there I adapt fragments into smaller monoprints, using birds, bodies and handwritten text as recurring motifs to map my inner landscape. Sometimes these fragments accumulate into installations, or I continue to push them into new compositions through printmaking and drawing.
How has your practice changed over time?
My practice has become slower, more cyclical, and more process-led over time. My work throughout art school was often about communicating a single idea or outcome, but now I think in constellations and series, where drawing, printmaking, material and writing all inform one another. Living with chronic illness has also changed the how I work, making rest, and ritual a larger part of it. I usually try to let my work stay visibly ‘unready’, embracing torn edges, inky fingerprints and a sense of ongoingness as I want it to be a truthful reflection to how my body and life actually feel.
How do you overcome creative blocks?
I hit creative blocks all the time, being somewhat neurotic while also dealing with fluctuating health and energy makes me constantly re-evaluate how and why I make what I make. When I’m really in a rut I return to very small, simple actions. That might mean ripping paper into scraps and making the quickest drawings I can, or writing slightly incoherent manifestos and lists until I find a connection within them. It’s vital for me to limit expectation that anything I create will become a ‘finished’ work as it gives me freedom later. I often realise the most spontaneous or ‘insignificant’ works hold the most honest material, and I work them back into larger installations or archives.
Which artists inspire you? Are there non-artistic influences such as literature or music that impact your work?
Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, and Claire Morgan are my biggest influences. Throughout my Masters I looked to their work for permission to be confessional, to use animals and textile or installation as psychological symbols, and to treat drawing as ‘thought feathers’ a way of catching ideas as they fly past. In writing, authors like Ali Smith have shaped how I think about metaphor, lists, and layered narratives. Their work encourages me to use language structurally in my own, letting handwritten text, archives and poetic fragments sit alongside imagery rather than explaining it. Music is also a huge influence, it’s usually the thing that sparks immediate emotion for me; I’m prone to tearing up listening to a song while I’m out with my dog and coming home to turn that energy into something visual or tactile.
Can you elaborate on the significance or symbolism of the chosen title of your work?
Shadows is a nod to a large installation piece I made previously, The Shadow Hanging Over Your Head, which grew from wanting to give literal form to a psychological weight. It is a textile piece stitched from used tarlatan from my printmaking, so the ‘shadow’ is both emotional burden and physical residue. The ten monoprints in this series were drawn in response to the installation’s looming figure, abstracting it into cages, birds, and skeletal figures, and seeing what happens when you turn toward the shadow instead of letting it follow you.
How do you know when a piece is complete?
My work behaves like a living archive, so ‘complete’ rarely means fixed; it means that, for now, the piece holds enough of its own power. A drawing, print or installation feels finished when the tension between chaos and structure is alive, and when adding more would tidy away its vulnerability. That moment usually arrives when I feel it reflects what I want to say but has also become a separate body with its own presence and boundaries.
Connect with Gemma over on Instagram or on her website, and see her work in TRACES running at SFG until January 9th 2026.
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