Maya Campbell on Intergenerational Collaboration.
As far back as I can remember, my grandma, Salome, has always encouraged me to write, draw and paint to express what I feel. Every Saturday since the age of ten, I’ve attended my grandma’s art workshops for Stockwell Community Trust, held on Stockwell Park Estate and open to all local children, which I now assist her in running. What I loved about these workshops is that they de-centre technical ability and focus on harnessing the unique creative potential within each individual. When studying art in school I recall precedence being placed on how accurately you can draw from life and how well you can theorise your ideas by showing research. Whilst both valuable skills, I don’t believe it is a useful model for nurturing and inspiring people to create genuinely. In our workshops we encourage abstraction, following intuitive processes and centre art as a form of catharsis, which has definitely shaped the way I work.
Intergenerational collaboration is a main facet of my own practice as an artist – my grandma is a constant source of inspiration and features in my photographic work. My uncle, Pharoah Smeaton-Russell, has improvised drums on a recent performance piece and my aunty, Mirka Vecerova, is also an artist, who asked me to write a poem for one of her moving image pieces called ‘Bones & Neighbours’, which was one of my first experiences of artistic collaboration. Over the past year, during lockdown, these familial and creative connections have sustained me and have fuelled my most recent pieces.
We have all spent an unprecedented amount of time at home and I found the many masks and vivid paintings around me to be great sources of inspiration. These pieces have allowed explorations into my grandma’s Nepali cultural identity and spirituality, her masks represent tantric deities, folklore gods and goddesses, and figures that have appeared to her in meditation. This mask is a tantric deity called the Bhairava, who is known to be a fearsome manifestation of Shiva – ‘Bha’ means creation, ‘ra’ means sustenance and ‘va’ means destruction, alluding to the cyclical nature of creation and destruction, a non-Western and less linear concept of time.
Another aspect of my grandma’s artwork and identity is her veneration of the human body, and her powerful expression of the feminine. We have an ongoing photographic collaboration that is situated around the space of the bath and evokes archetypal symbols of womanhood – our bodies are constantly going through cycles mirrored in nature, through the processes of motherhood, menstruation and menopause. From a very young age, pain is integrated into our lives as a natural, monthly process which comes with a varying degree of hormonal and psychological effects. We wanted to channel this experience through imagery.
Our combined creative methodology is simplistic and intuitive, within a space of domesticity where we experiment with ideas that relate to our shared experience of what it is to be a woman, to which there is no one answer.
