share


Bonnie Camplin: Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn

 

The title of Bonnie Camplin’s exhibition at 3236RLS Gallery, ‘Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn’, brings to mind one of the ‘greguerías’ coined by Spanish surrealist Ramón Gómez de la Serna (specifically that ‘anchovies dream of an olive mausoleum’). Ramón used these surrealist combinations of words to spark disorientating meanings from otherwise ordinary language, and something of the same impulse is apparent in Camplin’s employment of the resolutely unfashionable materials of HB pencil and watercolour paint.

 

Sparsely arranged around the chipped and variegated walls of the gallery, these deceptively complex images combine easily legible forms and figures in unsettling ways. ​Camplin’s wide-ranging practice – which has previously found expression in film, performance, music and writing – takes as its starting point our subjective experience of the world, and it is tempting to read this exhibition’s shifts between highly wrought figuration and scribbled expressionism as oscillations between interior and exterior, what we see and what we feel.  However interpreted, these curious works momentarily reacquaint us with the essential strangeness of our existence, caught between the real and the imagined.

 

Bonnie Camplin’s ‘Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn’ runs to 18 December 2016 at 3236RLS, London.


share


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. She was shortlisted for the 2015 Turner Prize.

READ NEXT

Interview

June 2011

Interview with Jorge Semprun

TR. Jacques Testard

Pierre Testard

Gwénaël Pouliquen

Interview

June 2011

The great Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprún died on Tuesday 8 June 2011 in Paris, aged 87. A Spanish Civil...

Interview

February 2017

Interview with Hajra Waheed

Rebecca Travis

Interview

February 2017

This conversation with Hajra Waheed began in person with an opportune meeting at her Montreal studio in April 2016....

fiction

June 2017

Turksib

Lutz Seiler

TR. Alexander Booth

fiction

June 2017

The jolts of the tracks were stronger now and came at irregular intervals. With my arms outstretched, I held...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required