Mr Stephen M Campbell – 21st Century Northern Artist – making paint, designing and installing unusual spaces and projects from The Puzzle Factory.

We have the vast interconnected world at our fingertips and we are looking at it through tiny pin holes. We can hold our world in one hand, but only see it pixel by pixel.

The Puzzle Factory

The Puzzle Factory is my studio in Eccles. It is part experimental paint laboratory, generative art studio, collaboration space, project incubator.

The ideas and motivations and ethos of the studio have been developed from the studios and networks that brought me here.

My first job was designing and printing T shirts for a punk record label at the Coliseum in Manchester as a teenager. Still a teenager I started taking commissions for paintings and attended Manchester School of Art studying Interactive Arts.

Manchester

Later superseded by School Of Digital Arts, Interactive Arts embraced contemporary practices in Art Design and Technology teaching technical skills and theory in all aspects of visual arts and having an awareness of the environmental impact. The most famous alumnus at currently being Ryan Gander. My projects involved designing and building furniture from recycled metal, collaborating with musicians and autonomous instruments. Editions of etchings in collaboration with Chetham’s Library, making videos, books and oil paintings.

Barcelona

I spent an Erasmus exchange in the Okupas of Barcelona where I learned to be independent and work within a network. I collaborated with punk artists and performers throughout Barcelona’s anarchist networks. The culture of punk, of not being afraid to try, to share opportunities and be resourceful has been at the heart of my practice

Poland

Free for Arts, Polish DeConstruction, Krakow, Torun

London

While in London I was a tenant of Bridget Riley at Space studios. Though we never met she introduced me to Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music lectures.

I worked for a network of gallery owners artists and antique dealers around Shoreditch and Islington

Salford

Islington Mill

From Space

The Merz Barn

Damien Hirst

Clark Art

Northern Art

Mathematical Art

Generative Art

The UK Government

Hepplestone’s Fine Art

This is a photo from outside the studio, the fence in the foreground is made from piano harps, the hazel was from the woodland trust following the death of Queen, the bench and table are made from scaffolding boards with no screws.