Drug Science x St Giles House Charity Art Live Auction

Liza Campbell is a London-based artist, born in the highlands of Scotland. Moving to London aged 17, she studied at Chelsea College of Arts. She defaulted while on holiday in Kenya and stayed there, living on an isolated island off the coast for four year years. It was here that she came across soapstone engraving and started studying this traditional African craft.

In 1993, she returned to London where she began engraving soapstone plates full-time. Her first two shows at All Saints Gallery followed by the Sladmore Gallery were both sell-outs.

Campbell takes found etchings printed on silk and paper and antique photographs, and then re-works them using ink and acrylic in bright, psychedelic formations. Her re-working, which she defines as ‘tinkering’, ‘intruding’ and ‘attacking’, is also felt in the way that she re-titles each work, a sardonic quip written across the bottom of each engraving, each one-liner humorously re-contextualising the image.