Image: Mum’s, Anne Campbell’s (nee Styles)  sewing kit circa 1959

The heart is a muscle

Caller:  Hello, is that Lee?

Me: Yes, speaking

Caller: Hello, I’m Paul calling from The Missing Bodies List

I am pleased to say that we think we may have found your heart

It was found outside shivering in the cold on the side of the road

by a late-night drinker. Broken ...

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Just going about your day 
Making a cup of tea 
You're at Tesco’s,
you're buying lettuce, 
‘Oh yeah’
A ball can drop very rapidly 

Certain times of the year
you feel more connected,
at the same time, 
sometimes,
just out of nowhere
 
The last couple of years  
he decided to go to work
Focus
To feel like his life 
hasn't been ripped apart
That memory of his life 
falling apart a...

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Just allowing it to be,

stop trying to intellectualise it

stop trying to find an answer, 

Or try to make rational sense of it

Futile.

It must make sense, 

everything and nothing makes sense

I hold myself to this standard

I regard myself a logical human being,

which I know is a contradiction

in and of itself

Humans are not logical

We are emotional

So why am I ...

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She just couldn't, 

She couldn't literally continue

Her whole life breaking down,

she’s had to build her whole life back up

And it's happened in such a painful,

but in such an incredible way 

that she could never have imagined, 

He has given her 

this incredible gift of her new life

But she wishes that he was with her 

He got the call, it happened

He was ...

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Humour is in my blood

Dr Campbell has a thesis,

a catalogue of comedic wordplay weapons to engage, disarm, highlight, defend, parry, attack and destroy

Heckler and poetress in camp and absurdity

Challenger, transgressor, subversive, rebel

Whether I’m Dr Campbell,

or Mademoiselle Camp-Belle,

humour is my disruptive and cathartic act

‘Even when you’re not using ...

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POW! WOW! WHAT’S THIS?!

Susan Broadhurst, author of Liminal Acts

writes that my work challenges what performance is

and at the same time interrogating liminality

meaning the ‘in-between’

For me, the window is a liminal threshold

that is neither private nor entirely public

When I was around 15 or 16,

I slept with a glass jar on a table by my bedside

Inside...

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She’s been getting away with it, repeatedly

She’s been walking in the rain just to get wet on purpose, repeatedly

She’s been forcing herself not to forget just to feel worse, repeatedly

She hates that mirror, it makes her feel so worthless, repeatedly

She’s an original sinner but when she’s with him, she couldn't care less, repeatedly

She thought she gave up falling in love a l...

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See, I thought I’d found my Tiana

A nice little smoochy snog,

behind that rock shaped like a toad

your kiss turned me into a frog

Not way it’s meant to be I thought,

was like that fable in reverse

Your kiss made this already prince

into a toad, your kiss was curse

And though your kiss was rather nice

and pleased as hell we did it did it

Opened my mouth to my...

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Surprised you’re not a footballer

You played a blinder tonight

Surprised you’re not a tailor

You stitched me up good and proper

Surprised you’re not a barber

You had me by the short and curlies

Surprise, surprise, mate,

you ain’t worth the agg.

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Collaboration is about being in the world

unless you want to be alone in the woods somewhere

And it is not about perfect unity,

collaboration is, as Tim Etchells suggests

about differences, collisions, incompatibilities

Are you ready to feel the embodiment of these terms?

Or are you feeling them already?

Friendly, convivial and equal collaboration,

is that possible...

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CREEPER

It just sort of crept up on me

The bus ride to the station

the buying of a flat white

the fancying of a man on the platform

the people going about their business

It all seemed very normal

I had no reason to fight it

because I didn’t know that it was there

Until I started having this feeling

and so, I butchered its body

Into pieces but as a whole...

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Thought is made manifest in the mark as a trace

but let me tell you about the trouble with traces

I rummage through life’s leftover marks

Traces from a previous exhibition

Text left on a wall,

plinths not yet been removed,

drawings now dumped in a corner as rubbish

I am for a poetry of embodied debris,

left in the aftermath

Speaking bodies caught

between memo...

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Image: Lee Campbell, ‘PITCH FACE’, pins and mixed media on canvas (2005) 

When I was young, JD and coke

Tried acting macho, what a joke

My friends knew that was mirrors smoke

‘Be yourself Lee, don’t cut him out!’

Whilst acting macho, breath it stink

Jack Daniels was my favourite drink

I gave right in to his wink wink

Lost all control, was on the brink

Control of...

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