The power of a career-spanning exhibition is in joining the dots of an artist’s development – the changing themes, the recurring characters, the seismic life events. It’s these changes that make the National Gallery’s Cressida Campbell survey exhibition so compelling. The exhibition groups the themes of Campbell’s work from the earliest formative years (starting at just eight years old) up until the present, showing her continued fascination with the world around her.
“She returns to key subjects at different points over her life,” says Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, the Gallery’s Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings. “We’re beginning inside her home with still life - with objects that she’s collected, with food and meals that she’s shared. Then we move into a second room of interior views of her home and those of her friends, and then we move out into her garden before a central section that’s all about studio and process. The last two rooms move further out into the exterior world, with a focus on bushland and waterways around Sydney harbour and beyond.”
Highlighting her unique approach to woodblock painting and printmaking, the exhibition takes the viewer through Campbell’s shifting forms, such as panoramas and tondos (a circular painting, print or relief carving), as well as the impact of personal loss and growth across her life. To offer a taste of Campbell’s vibrant and moving work, Noordhuis-Fairfax has picked five pieces that help encapsulate the artist’s arc.
Trout remains (1995)
This woodblock painting of the skeletal remains of a meal is a perfect introduction to Campbell’s keen eye for the quirky. “I think it encapsulates Cressida’s personality in many ways - her attention to the beauty of overlooked details,” says Noordhuis-Fairfax. “And I think it gives a sense of her generosity in the evidence of a meal recently shared. Other people’s presences are felt but they’re not necessarily in the images.”
Sydney Harbour triptych (1998)
This three-panelled panorama of one of Sydney’s most iconic views was inspired by early colonial engravings of Port Jackson that Campbell saw at the opening of the National Gallery back in 1982, but it’s Campbell’s unique approach to the iconic imagery that sets it apart. “I love how initially you assume she has chosen a postcard view but actually she’s cropped out most of the Harbour Bridge and most of the Opera House,” the curator says. “It’s those really interesting compositional decisions that, in turn, direct your vision to the centre of the view. I like how she’s manipulating how you read the work without you being conscious of it.”
Black bamboo (2017)
Here, Campbell brings to life a garden scene of bamboo and clivias, cropped closely (in much the same way as the Sydney Harbour image) and sketched directly onto plywood. All Campbell’s work starts like this, before carving and painting, but here the stark rendering of outlines is left intact. “Normally she would then spend weeks carving out all those lines and then spend another month painting thick layers of watercolour onto the plywood block and then re-carving around the darker colours to make sure they don’t flood when she’s printing off a single woodcut,” says Noordhuis-Fairfax.
Hallway with kilims (2017–2018)
For Noordhuis-Fairfax, this simple image of a domestic hallway is imbued with emotion. “For me this interior view represents a pivotal change after [her first husband] Peter Crayford died, and shows her move away from bold graphics towards a greater emphasis on atmosphere,” she says. “She began to make works about in-between spaces – empty hallways, reflections, looking through windows. It was always about composition, but now it’s about composition and mood, and that was really a big change in her work.”
Bedroom nocturne (2022)
This piece is a true slice of Campbell’s everyday existence, showing her bedroom with its unmade bed, phone charger and framed works by other artists. Part of what makes this image so intimate is how Campbell has framed the scene within the tondo form. “Cressida talks about how this round format, which she was initially just using as compositional experimentation, has a sort of peephole connotation,” says Noordhuis-Fairfax. “It’s like we’re getting these small glimpses into her private world.”
This article is produced in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia.
