In conversation with
Maya Campbell

Maya Gurung-Russel Campbell is a South London-based artist who uses a range of media to explore her dual heritage, creating work that is composed of sound, moving image, oral history, poetry and analogue photography.

This builds an image of matrilineal mythologies and lived experiences whilst interrogating universal themes. She completed a BA (Hons) in Photography from the London College of Communication (2021) and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2021.

Maya recently exhibited in Every Woman Biennale at Copeland Park Gallery, London (2021), and is currently a recipient of the Mead Award (2022-2023), she has worked as an Artist Educator for the Hayward Gallery, Studio Voltaire, South London Gallery and Firstsite, Colchester; and launched her first solo show Folklore Imaginary at 87 Gallery in Hull (2022).

Artiq When was the moment you realised you were going to be an artist?

Maya Initially, I always wanted to be a novelist as my childhood love was reading. I would finish books in a day and completely get lost in the stories, particularly fantasy as it was what we had in the house. I would research mythical beasts and write my own stories. Looking back on this, I can see how my love of folklore and storytelling developed.

Becoming an artist crept up on me, I come from a very creative family and I’ve seen the hardships of being an artist within a system that doesn’t value creativity so I think I had some societal conditioning to break free of in terms of believing it wasn’t economically viable to be an artist (which is a very valid concern).

Therefore always mentally transforming my passion into a more standardised job role–turning novelist into journalist, artist into editorial photographer and so on!

Thankfully this didn’t go on for very long, I gradually relaxed and stopped trying to control things–I don’t think an artist is something you become, I believe it’s already there and you have to remove things in order to get there again


Artiq Who or what has had the most significant influence on your practice?

Maya My grandma! Since the age of four, she’s been my guardian and carer, but even before I came into her care we had a very close bond–she constantly took me to art galleries, the Natural History Museum (one of my favourite places in London) and was always very militant in emphasising the importance of education.

As well as raising three children, she also chose to raise me and acts as a carer for my mum who suffers from schizophrenia, so she’s a really strong female figure in my life. All of her artwork lines our walls, masks, paintings and mosaics that are heavily influenced by her Nepali heritage and culture.

She also ran art workshops in our local community centre for years, opened a gallery (named the Salome Art Gallery after her) for NHS mental health service users in Brixton and still supports at the care home around the corner, so supports our community in a grassroots way despite always having her hands full. I don’t know how she does it all!

Artiq We recently had the pleasure of including four works from your 'Adding a Face Series' in a project here in London. Could you tell us a bit more about these specific works?

Maya These works were a very important turning point in my practice, up until then I had mainly worked in the medium of the still photographic image and I was in my last year of BA Photography at London College of Communication when the pandemic hit, meaning we had no access to university facilities.

I think this experience emphasised existing inequalities, suddenly confined to the site of the home, the outcome of our experience and of the artwork we produced was highly dependent on what we had access to, what we could afford and what kind of mental state we were in.

At the time my tutor Paul Tebbs sent me a load of reading resources and film material, bell hooks and French essay film Statues Also Die which is about historical African art and the effects of colonialism on how it is perceived–all of these rich resources could be accessed for free.

I started to think about the life of spiritual objects, I have many of my grandma’s handmade masks on my walls at home and I imagined these faces of Nepali folklore figures severed from their life source and placed into the carceral space of the museum–places like the British Museum are prisons for culturally and spiritually significant objects, and they are actively continuing a legacy of brutality.

Like many around the world, I was really affected by the murder of George Floyd and the outpouring of collective grief from the global black community during lockdown felt it was in opposition to this performative, capitalistic guise of sadness from large corporations and individuals who represented and were embroiled in systems of brutality towards the black body to this very day. George Floyd was not an anomaly and the narrative around his death triggered me starting to really think critically about Britain and the legacy of empire here that I am inextricably linked to and psychologically harmed by, in ways that I’ve only begun to extract.

Adding A Face orbits around a Plaster of Paris imprint of my face, the nature of the object means the expression changes and contorts depending on which direction you see it from–this sense of multiplicity and duplicity is central to the work. In order to fragment it, I placed it into a bonfire and watched my face slowly split into pieces. Wearing a veil made from Nepali textiles (dhaka) that we’ve had in the family since before I was born, I hold one of the fragments in front of my face, outside amidst nature and in the short video there is a spoken monologue that is vocally distorted. The video version also contains an artist talk that places the piece in an “essay film” category, which wasn’t completely intentional but seemed the best way to submit my work virtually at the time!

Artiq Earlier this summer, you completed a 2-month long residency in Kathmandu, Nepal. What did you learn during your stay, and what is your most prominent memory fromthis stay?

Maya My most prominent memory isn’t explicitly related to art, we went to see a full moon classical music concert at Kirateshwar Mahadev Temple in Kathmandu which was one of the best musical experiences of my life.

It was set in a cobbled courtyard with a small, painted stage and was an absolutely blissful night! The 2-month long residency with Space A, Nepal was particularly special as I was given the freedom to explore Nepal with my partner, Buster and just create freely in the studio space on the roof of the building.

One of our hosts, Jupiter, who is an artist and a teacher himself, taught me the traditional method of making ritual masks in Nepal and Neda, our other host, made sure to arrange for me to meet a master mask-maker in Bhaktapur. I can’t thank them enough, as they really tailored the residency to fit my interests and needs so perfectly!


Artiq Your multidisciplinary practice includes sound, moving image, oral history, poetry and analogue photography. How do you choose which medium to apply for which idea?

Maya It feels like the medium chooses me! I spend a lot of time with the idea, purely in my head, getting a sense of what it looks, feels and sounds like, it takes me a while to actually get around to trialling the idea.

I was laughing the other day with someone about what a recent piece was at the beginning of its journey, it was absolutely bizarre and just a flat-out terrible potential work–but at the time I was really devoted to it being a certain way and it somehow naturally progressed into a more visually stimulating representation of the multitude of ideas and experiences behind it.

Something I took away from this is always experimenting with form, even though now I can look back and see that the first iteration was sort of ridiculous, at the time I was just in the process and not prioritising aesthetic value, but instead trying to
experience the idea in the way that suited it at the time.

The output which is usually read as the artwork is only a sliver of the actual piece, the ‘real piece’ is the physical, mental and spiritual processes that supersede it, which so far has happened to contain many different ways of making.

Artiq What do you want the audience to take away from your work?


Maya I don’t necessarily want any one person to take away any one specific thing, I always find it difficult to answer questions about who my audience is or how I want an audience to read my work, because it’s the last thing I consider and can feel like placing a restriction on the potential of what I’m making.

If it can stimulate a conversation, mental image or transmute something ephemeral, then it’s transcended being something static and has become alive in another form.


Artiq Can you recommend another artist you think everyone should know about?

Maya I am a big fan of artist Femi Dawkins, who I met during New Contemporaries 2021 where he exhibited The March of the Wogs.

He’s really acting as a conduit for a force larger than himself and also introduced me to his musical ensemble Ancestral Blues, which features one of my favourite musicians, Archie Shepp!

To learn more about Maya Campbell's practice, visit her Website or Instagram