The Green Room Exhibitions – Éabha Campbell.

about

Formaldehyde presents a new body of work by Éabha Campbell exploring the abject and the dichotomy between decay and preservation. The work combines elements of portraiture, still life, biological specimens and ethically sourced taxidermy marionettes, created from found roadkill and naturally deceased organic specimens. 

Formaldehyde invokes the grotesque, sliminess and fragmentation, displaying work as if it were in a natural history museum, muddying the boundary between biology and fine art. Sea creatures, insects and fragmented morphologies are a recurring motif, slippery forms that defy classification, existing in a space between human and nonhuman, living and decaying.

Artist Bio

Éabha Campbell is an Irish multidisciplinary artist and musician working across oil painting, performance and taxidermy. They are based in Belfast after graduating from BSoA in 2023 and were awarded the PS² Graduate Award and Catalyst Arts Graduate Award the same year. Campbell’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with their first solo show at Catalyst Arts featured in the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival 2024, following several exhibitions in Weimar, Germany.

Their practice explores the intersection of the abject and queer identity, integrating auditory, olfactory, visual, and cutaneous materials to investigate the tension between attraction and repulsion, the familiar and the grotesque. Their work centres around orifices, decomposition, infestation, and transformation, drawing on the surreal and the absurd. They aim to capture the ephemerality of decay and metamorphosis using painting, taxidermy, and biological specimens to evoke in-between states that challenge the binary of life and death. 

Recent work subverts the religious symbolism of Musca depicta, using arthropods and fragmented organic material to satirise oppressive institutions and embody queer resilience. Campbell sees the grotesque as a political and personal space; queerness as abjection, and abjection as resistance. 

Their work has been published in Queer Assembly (2023), the Irish Arts Review (2023), VAI News Sheet (2024), and featured in the New Generation Gallery. They are currently based at Flax Studios, Belfast.

A live performance will be held on the 19th of September in conjunction with the exhibition for Belfast Culture Night.

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