Cath Campbell
My mum was a beatnick/Canary yellow with royal blue
Cath Campbell’s work encompasses drawing, photography, sculpture, film, installation and large-scale architectural interventions. For this exhibition Campbell proposes public readings from a changing collection of poetry describing a fictional journey across an American landscape taken from Canary yellow with royal blue, a series of 52 short films, currently in progress.
Cath’s work was intense and concerned with how people read text and how text is translated through Google Translate.
Different people were asked to read a script that had been translated and then taken out of context. The readers were invited to read the text unseen and as English is not their first language this reader was very tense.
The readers read the same script but brought their own individuality to the task. Cath became the witness and recorder as well as the artist. The screens display the readers reading concurrently.
At the end of the performance, the reader asked Cath to explain some of the words in the script. the reader had spoken the words but needed to know their meaning, Cath went to great pains to explain the words in different ways, a more human idea of ‘translate.’
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