Visual artist, performer and facilitator Tom Campbell will be WAS Artist in Residence for the month leading up to and during Ballydehob Jazz Festival. Tom will create work inspired by the Ballydehob Jazz Festival programme and facilitate papier maché creative workshops for the local community in Ballydehob.
Tom Campbell will revisit his project ‘Musical Animals’ which sets to create new drawings of animals playing musical instruments. A selection of the finished drawings will be curated into a self publish a book at a later stage. This body of work together with other framed and oil paintings will be presented and displayed in WAS gallery during the residency. During his residency, Tom will also experiment with making a giraffe’s head in papier maché, experimenting with textures and making the piece as realistic as possible. One might even spot it walking around the village in a suit as a walkabout performance!
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Artist statement:
Tom Campbell is a Scottish born, Cork based, artist. Tom is multi-disciplinary artist, who studied sculpture, but is largely self-taught. His visual art focuses on expressive drawing on which he works prolifically. His exhibition of 1,000 Drawings is testament to that. He paints and has a passion for papier mâché sculpture, with animals often being the theme.
Tom enjoys facilitating workshops sharing his skills and working in groups. He has worked with many community groups. A large focus of his community based work is ‘The Dog Project’, which has been run five times each time creating over 100 papier mâché dogs, involving anyone who wishes to collaborate.
Tom’s other creative outlets are music and performance, singing, playing the ukulele, guitar and harmonica. He writes songs and has aspirations to record an album. In performance Tom is especially interested in comedy, clown and mask work. He has solid circus skills including unicycle, juggling and walking on hands. He has done many solo shows and acts introducing various absurd characters.
Humour is a big part of Tom’s life and art. Tom likes to dream of a utopia, urging us to live more in harmony with each other and this beautiful planet which we share. One thing is for sure, Tom won’t stop making art.
VISUAL ARTS
“Without the artist, there would be no collector, nor gallery. But art is more important than the artist, and everyone can make art. It is no big deal. Long live creativity, the creative spirit that gives humanity hope, empowers, transforms, inspires and feeds itself on love and peace.”
Tom has been a professional visual artist for 25 years, exhibiting regularly.
ARTS FACILITATION
“Art could be creativity that gives life through action. The duty of the artist is to use creativity to hone and share their skills, and to help develop the creativity of others. ”
Sharing my skills through facilitation is a large part of my practice, I have facilitated workshops for over 15 years. I have worked with diverse groups including children, teenagers, elderly and people with mental health issues.
Projects have included mural painting, papier mâché and parades.
PERFORMANCES
“A child scribbles on a fresh white wall, another sings a lullaby to calm a child, an apprentice juggler, launches a club and catches. Could these actions be ‘art’? ”
I have been creating performance for over 20 years, with a strong interests in performance art, circus, mask and puppet, regularly organizing lively cabarets and avant guarde solo shows. I’ve worked internationally in many festivals and have appeared on television.
Thanks to support from Cork County Council.
