Cas Campbell

Cas Campbell strives to shake up what was assumed to be immutable – linearity of time, systems of power, the natural order, achieved through the power of her glazed stoneware sculptures. Born in New Zealand in 1995, Campbell works between London and Brighton, holding an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, and is now on display at the Emanuel von Baeyer Gallery until June 25th 2026. 

Campbell’s work breaks the chronology of time and nature by evoking ‘deep time’, a view of history that looks with a wide lens at its entire inventory, cherry-picking the best bits to create sculptures that harmonise in their dichotomy. From corseted stag beetles to whole coral reefs bound in rope and a coat, Campbell’s works often explore the binaries of constraint and release. This is then translated through many ideas – of queer cultures, of gender, parenthood, loosened and questioned as much as the natural order she draws from.  
Campbell acts in dialogue with the ecological and the personal, and by doing so reaches to both the present moment and far into the past, the ancient. Her figures are grounded in the natural world by the very earthen clay they’re made from, but represent a wider societal world in all its imperfections. Interrogating these imperfections through comparison to nature is a novel but necessary practice that artists need to be doing right now. Very few are doing so with this much rigour and beauty.