Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell : I Want to be Ready
Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell's solo exhibition, I Want to Be Ready, transforms Incubator into a site of quiet resistance, a space where the artist negotiates constraint through the elemental act of knotting. Working with deconstructed Union Jack and St George's flags alongside rope, cotton, jute fibre and an array of military surplus materials, Campbell transforms symbols of national authority into suspended networks of tension and release, each double knot a meditation on what it means to prepare oneself for an uncertain world.
The exhibition's title, borrowed from Danielle Goldman's study of improvised dance, positions readiness not as anticipation of a known future, but as a practice of staying present within constraint. Campbell's installations emerge from what Goldman terms "tight places" - points of tension where "race, class, gender, sexuality, time, and artistic conventions" converge. Through repetitive knotting, the artist enacts a "sped-up, imaginative, expressive negotiation" with these constraints, transforming both civic symbols and military infrastructure into fluid, breathing forms that reimagine the relationship between protection and control.
Working without predetermined outcomes, Campbell's practice echoes the process-based investigations of 1960s artists like Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou, while finding particular kinship with Magdalena Abakanowicz's fibre sculptures. Like Abakanowicz, Campbell understands textile as both material and metaphor. The materials themselves carry their own histories: flags as markers of territory, tents as temporary shelters for those who serve the state yet through Campbell’s interventions, these objects lose their original functions, becoming raw material for transformation.
Once suspended, these works breathe with the viewer's movement, their forms never quite settling into static display. Campbell's materials become permeable membranes that catch light and shadow, sound and silence. The double knot becomes her signature gesture, a simple action repeated across canvas and rope until it builds into something vast and encompassing. This process extends into her photographic work, where the wet collodion tintype process captures fragments of these same historical materials, preserving moments of transformation in the silvered surface of metal plates.
The four tintypes that accompany the textile installations operate as temporal bridges, connecting past and present through the materiality of both image and process. Using a photographic technique from the 1800s that requires coating aluminium plates with wet collodion chemicals before exposure through a large-format camera, Campbell creates images that feel both ancient and immediate. Three tintypes capture abstracted fragments of flags discovered in the Maritime Museum's archives in Greenwich, their deteriorated surfaces rendered in the distinctive silvered tones of the historical process. The fourth tintype presents her grandmother's passport, its bureaucratic formality transformed into something intimate and spectral.
This process of accumulation and repetition finds its sonic counterpart in Lene Tassin's sound installation, where a deconstructed piano's exposed harp strings create a continual loop that echoes Campbell's knotting practice. Nearby, a chalked net titled White flag of crawling, the red flag of the morning sounds evokes something washed up and fragmentary, while downstairs an open copy of Vonnegut's “Slaughterhouse Five” lies weighted by a cast aluminium form. Each work speaks to constraint and release through different material languages - sound, chalk, text, metal - yet all emerge from the same impulse to transform through patient, repetitive gestures.
I Want to Be Ready presents Campbell as an artist deeply attuned to the political potential of seemingly simple acts. In a moment when readiness often implies militaristic preparation or anxious anticipation, Campbell proposes an alternative: readiness as presence, as process, as the patient accumulation of small gestures that ultimately reshape the space around us. In the gallery's transformed space, viewers encounter not a declaration but an invitation to witness the slow, determined work of making ready for whatever comes next.
