Joyce Campbell

Joyce Campbell (b. Aotearoa New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury (1992) and an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (1999). She has lived, taught, and worked in Southern California and in Auckland, New Zealand, and has undertaken residencies in New Zealand (2001) and Antarctica (2006). Her recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques, such as the daguerreotype and ambrotype, as well as conventional analogue and digital photography, video, film, and sculpture to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems. 

Campbell’s interest in biological and physical systems has led her to develop a set of photographic techniques that render visible the minute and incremental emergence of complex form, be that the growth of a microbial colony, crystals in the process of formation, the migration of glaciers into the ocean, or of silver from an electrode dispersing into colloidal suspension. She produces mural-scale photographs that invite her audiences to immerse themselves in the environments depicted. Campbell has participated in numerous exhibitions both in New Zealand and abroad including The Future is already here- it’s just not evenly distributed: The 20th Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island & Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2016), Heavenly Bodies, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2014), Che Mondo: What a World, Curated by Carole Ann Klonarides, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2013), Te Taniwha/Crown Coach, Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA September (2012), The Liquid Archive, Curated by Geraldine Barlow, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2012), Altogether Elsewhere, Curated by Rob Tufnell for the Zoo Art Fair, London, Great Britain (2009). In 2019 the major survey exhibition On The Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the work of Joyce Campbell curated by John Welchman opened at The Adam Art Gallery in Wellington.