Weaving Currents: Reclaiming Joy / Artwork by Melissa English Campbell

In Weaving Currents: Reclaiming Joy, Melissa English Campbell presents a vivid and unapologetic celebration of family, community, and the serenity of water. Drawing on themes of swimming, watching children grow, and sun-drenched days at the lake, she transforms these familiar experiences into powerful narratives of identity and resistance. Featuring her own family members—including those from the LGBTQ+ community—as models, Campbell challenges stereotypes and recent political attacks, reclaiming public and personal spaces for self-expression, dignity, and joy.

Campbell’s work thrives at the intersection of the personal and the abstract. Her mixed-media pieces, combining painting with weaving, depict bodies in states of ease and play: floating, wading, basking in sunlight. Each figure and landscape stands as a quiet act of defiance against a hostile political climate that seeks to marginalize and erase LGBTQ+ lives. By placing her models in idyllic vacation and leisure settings, Campbell constructs a visual counter-narrative—one that rejects dehumanization and affirms visibility, belonging, and love.

Fiber art, with its associations of labor, care, and domesticity, becomes in Campbell’s hands a potent metaphor for community and interconnectedness. Once dismissed as “craft,” it emerges here as a bold medium of storytelling, weaving together threads of identity, activism, and personal history.

Water, a recurring motif in the series, embodies both fluidity and transformation. It mirrors the complexities of identity, the growth of children as they move beyond the family into the wider world, and the refusal to be confined by rigid categories. At the same time, water serves as sanctuary—a place of freedom, ease, and refuge from societal expectation.

Weaving Currents: Reclaiming Joy also explores the power of repetition to generate rhythm and flow, much like music. Repetition here functions on multiple levels: as a literal visual device, as a meditation on familiarity and comfort, and as a reflection of the soothing patterns that creative practice can provide. The doubling of panels suggests both a mirror and an echo, reinforcing the work’s central inquiry into rhythm, recurrence, and the way repetition opens space for reflection and contemplation.

Through lush palettes, layered constructions, and tender depictions, Campbell underscores the power of joy as a form of protest. Weaving Currents: Reclaiming Joy insists that moments of pleasure, connection, and rest are never merely personal—they are profoundly political acts, especially in times of uncertainty.

BAYARTS
28795 Lake Road
Bay Village, Ohio 44140
BAYarts.net
440.871.6543

EVENTS:

Tricia Kaman: A Closer Look, through December 23 in the Sullivan Family Gallery

Debra Sue Solecki: Nature’s Networks, through December 23 in the Sally J. Otto Gallery

BAYarts Holiday Extravaganza, 10am-5pm Saturday, November 22

Weaving Currents: Reclaiming Joy, Artwork by Melissa English Campbell, January 9–February 7. Opening 5-8pm Friday, January 9 in the Sullivan Family Gallery