Artist Q&A
Hal Camplin
I have learnt that I want to not suffer for my art... The joy of meditative states is that they can be wild or calm, yet the energy of a creative flow state carries me.
Hal Camplin in his shed/studio, Bristol 2026
When did you start making (visual art/other) and why?
At 17 years old I had an operation to treat a spinal condition and it changed my life. Art became the main way I could process my experience of chronic pain. The movement in making art allowed me to discharge emotions. With my body’s alarm system always on, it was hard to relax. I always felt freedom and excitement with paint and trusted in its messiness. I used MRI scans of my own spine as a source material but I took creative leaps and treated my figurative collages like surreal landscapes.
After deserting art school, I studied history and began making sculptural installations in a shed. The beginning of my love affair with the art shed. In a completely undirected way, I started playing with a variety of building materials out of skips and furniture from my parents’ dusty cupboards, such as my original playpen, which I used to create an environment to experiment with spinal figures and performance.
How would you describe your making process? How do you use your energy and time to produce work alongside your illness? What spaces and places do you make in?
For me, pencil and paper is still accessible and mentally satisfying. Once something is drawn I believe something has a form of existence. I like to be alive to daydreaming and streams of consciousness. Energy I need to make bigger constructions is often spontaneous. I prefer to paint fast to avoid overthinking. I might have an overall motif that has arisen from drawings in sketchbooks over many years, but mainly I let the material take over and allow accident and chance to arise. Then I work with it. I am working with processes surrealists would talk about such as automated drawing, a sense of being taken over. I’ve always wanted to walk into my paintings and be taken away to an imaginary place.
I now make these meditative labyrinth-like floor paintings where you can move on a path. I add soundtracks to draw out the healing in the movement and ritual. I also work with clay as a way of connecting my sensations on the inside and outside of my body. I have grown a belief in actively creating an embodied connection to positive emotions, which has increased my tolerance for pain. So much so that it has meant that I no longer use painkillers. I developed this in my research on Jungian active imagination and chronic pain, which involves meditating and dialoguing with parts of myself to resolve inner conflicts (www.halcamplinart.com/active-imagination-and-chronic-pain). I have many inner conflicts relating to my life with chronic pain. So still much work to do, and making art seems to be my guide.
My sculptures and assemblages are more deliberate and considered. They are symbolic and conceptual. My process with sculptures has often relied on DIY materials (stuff purchased in a DIY store, or obtained from a skip). Unconsciously, my process has necessitated using this raw material, where the lived experience of these objects seems to spark the process. Vertebrae Heart, Spinal Chord and Manhole Eclipse are works that survived my struggle with them.
I seem to have lived through many patterns of crash and burn with art and work. I have learnt that I do not want to suffer for my art, and I mix up my creative practice so I don’t overdo it. The joy of meditative states is that they can be wild or calm, yet the energy of a creative flow state carries me. It has its own adrenaline.
Spinal Chord (2020)
reclaimed piano parts - wood, metal and felt
"I love my shed studio - I feel safe and loved in there - connecting with my internal universe in object form. It has evolved, and I often use it to invite gatherings and be sociable. I work in a therapeutic warehouse-based studio run by a charity in Bristol, and work alongside others providing therapeutic support. With performance work, I am then freer to make in different places, which is liberating".
What inspires you? Books, film, art, podcasts, etc? Recently or in the past…
I like the surrealist movement and abstract expressionists, but don’t really have a love of any particular artist from that movement. I find it interesting how so many British artists were included in the international surrealist exhibition of 1936, but they didn’t really sign up to that movement. For example, the work by artists such as Henry Moore has obvious connections with unconscious material. Again, my study of art psychotherapy has reminded me of why I was so drawn to that surreal, internal world as a place rife for investigation of the self but also the collective mysteries, symbols and archetypes lying in wait. I also love dark humour in film, but find it hard to find. Other than David Lynch, I really love Roy Andersson’s work. Songs from the Second Floor (2000) highlights a kind of triumphant failure in modern life. The opening scenes show a magician performing a sawing in half trick which goes wrong, as you see the participant in later shots covered in bandages. It led me to make my own version of a sawing in half trick, which I performed many times as an invented character called the murdering magician. One of many ideas running in my subconscious about the need to gain control over pain by symbolically inflicting it or being the instigator of it. Especially when I was young this was a tricky process to interrupt. So art provides the safe expression of it with no need to act out in any real sense.
Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
For me, Camus and the philosophy of absurdism provide the most optimistic framework for any meaning or beliefs I have about life and how to live. I find absurdist humour in art important if difficult to convey, but I find artists such as Robert Gober, Mauricio Catalan, David Shrigley and Grayson Perry do it well. I find the Blindboy podcast and short stories very creative and refreshingly unapologetic about the beauty of weird narrative. His background in performance, his desire to have privacy by wearing a bag on his head – hiding but somehow standing out more… and since I also perform as a giant badger, I know this well.
My favourite book is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was a successful writer who developed locked-in syndrome after a stroke. He could only communicate by moving his eyelid. He managed to work with a speech and language therapist and wrote a book all about existing with just the majesty of imagination. In times of crisis, art is crucial, even if it is the first thing to be cut out of the economy.
How would you describe your relationship to the wider world?
I've always fought a bit with the wider world. I've been angsty, or pissed off about wanting to blame someone or something for my pain. The Covid pandemic brought up strange feelings for me in this relationship. Suddenly, there was a crisis that really affected everyone, and no one knew how long it would last. It reminded me of how I used to believe my pain would go away at some point. The insanity of the permanent alarm of an overstimulated pain system has caused me to deeply mistrust my body. And so, I saw the discomfort in others, and I felt I belonged in that drama. The drama required to adapt and accept changes to ways of living. Eventually, I trained in psychotherapy and have developed greater peace with the world and a deeper connection. Art communicating pain has a rich history, and I am more accepting of that vulnerable place now. I need to be vulnerable in order to understand other people's vulnerability. I want to form an honest relationship.
I relish the dream of a more compassionate, wider world guided by creative intuition. Deserters has provided a chance to connect with artists who deliver this in their own way. I really appreciate the spirit of the group within the individual approaches to surviving with art and making work that delivers it.
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