The editorial team’s favorite at the beginning of the year.
His name: Clayton Campbell and his book is entitled The Anthropocene Blood Book.
The images are accompanied by this text:
The Anthropocene Blood Book series brings together different interests of mine that began when I spent time in London in the 1970’s. My images explore a longtime interest in Victorian romanticism, often used to convey a sense of escapism and to explore themes of the supernatural and the irrational that I find an affinity with. I was influenced by different artists but especially Richard Dadd’s wonderful painting, The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke which I saw in the Tate Museum. I recall the the engravings of Blake and Hogarth whose moral narratives appealed to me as sly, thinly disguised socio/political commentary. Recently, the art of Victorian decoupage (and how it evolved into collage and montage in dada and surrealism) led me to uncover the strange Victorian Blood Book. It is a unique scrap book made in 1854 by the British Reverand John Bingley Garland for his daughter as a wedding gift.
Regarding the term, Anthropocene, it is scientific slang representing an era of planetary decline during our lifetime. Officially, our current epoch is called the Holocene, commencing 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age. As we become aware of the speed of climate change and the vast extinction of species now occurring, we have entered an entirely different era when human activity is having a deleterious impact by filling the Earth’s atmosphere with massive amounts of carbon and methane. Scientists suggest that the beginning of the Anthropocene should be 1945, when humans tested the first atomic bomb.
The metaphor of blood, as used in the Victorian Blood Book, and as I mean in my work, is ancient and historically sacred as a life giving, death dealing substance. Blood is such an important idea; it sits at the center of so many kinds of subjects, both practical, in terms of medicine and lineage, but also spiritual, as a physical and ritualistic means of accessing the divine. In my series, blood literally drips with myriad symbolisms from each picture.
The Anthropocene Blood Book is a visual evocation of the un/reality of the Anthropocene. Using the original and obscure Blood Book as a starting point by keeping the drips of blood, I built each artwork from unique imagery that are centered around the two themes that have concerned me the most throughout my lifetime- the degradation of the planet, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and waste. Embedded in my work is a deeply held belief in the possibility of the spiritual regeneration of our world.
All the images in the book measure 44” x 44”.
Clayton Campbell
Clayton Campbell : The Anthropocene Blood Book
12″ x 12″
40 pages
color
The book is self-published and available through the photographer’s site :
www.claytoncampbell.com
