Chris Cambell

Chris Cambell (They/He) is a neurodivergent QTIPOC best known for their intense love of story. It’s the engine that drives their poetry-centric multidisciplinary practice. Chris highlights the stories that society overlooks, questions what this says about the world, and explores how creativity can break this cycle. Chris believes in constant reinvention. Embraces their endless curiosity. Fiercely advises finding poets, living or dead, that are fluent in you and letting them change your heart. Who knows where that might lead? Maybe Chris will be reading about you next!

Chris is a 2024 Explore Fund recipient and they plan to use the fund to bring together their photography and poetry work to explore a new form of visual poetry.

“I want to explore how poetry and photography can work together to tell the stories of queer people in and around Bradford. How do the two forms construct a three dimensional portrait of a person? What do the differences in the portrayals these mediums offer tell us about how we as queer people view ourselves and how we are viewed by society? There are lots of people who see us but never really see *us* – I’d love to explore how we can change that and, hopefully, learn more about ourselves through the process!”

Chris was also part of our 2023 Empowered LGBTQIA+ cohort of artists, we interviewed them on their work and their time on the programme.

Tell us a bit about your artistic journey and background.

I grew up in an abusive home, raised by a mother who was still a child herself. I found art through tv, through books, through any media I encountered. I was desperate for anything that could show me what things were supposed to be like.

But art isn’t a blueprint. There’s no answer sheet to life. The power of all this isn’t in getting things right, it’s in failing with a smile. Finding something that makes you want to try again a hundred thousand times.

As for whether my approach to learning was formal or alternative, I feel like it’s been both. True, I got my BA in Creative Writing. But from a university that didn’t offer a Creative Writing programme. I was the first and, as far as I know, last. I had to carve out what it looked like myself. Overload my schedule with additional courses to make it possible. Spent my nights and weekends acting, doing improv, and performing spoken word poetry throughout the city of Chicago.

I know there are maps out there for artists, but I never found one. I’ve always just thrown myself at what interests me and trusted that I’d find a way. It’s not a fast approach, and moving to a different continent didn’t help, but ‘maximum effort’ is the only way I know.

What themes or concepts consistently appear in your work? What motivates you as an artist?

“I used to feel like everything I created was about love. In some ways, that’s still true. If you stop to think about it, pretty much everything we do can be sourced back to loving something/someone or the lack of it.

But as I grow older I’m less sure of what love is. It’s probably a lot more, and a lot less, than I’ve always thought it was. So I don’t tend to use it as a definable lens in my work anymore. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things we use without understanding them. But I don’t want to make work that pushes people towards easy answers.

So I suppose I’m constantly exploring how we are such unreliable narrators. I often write about issues surrounding identity, justice, intergenerational trauma, failure, and hope.

Especially hope. I’ve often reflected on the many ways I could have died, given up, or just been completely broken underneath the waterfall of life. I’ve seen it happen to so many friends and family members. But not me. And that’s not something I credit to myself. I just think… what else was I going to do? I guess the world isn’t going to get rid of Chris Cambell that easily!

While I’ve always known that feeling, I can’t explain how it found me. I don’t think I’ll stop making things until I do.”

Can you walk us through your creative process from ideation to completion of a piece of art? Do you follow a specific routine or have any unique rituals during your creative process?

“I’ve got aphantasia which is a fancy way of saying I have zero control over my mind’s eye. “Picture an apple in your head.” My 10 year old would be able to think an apple into existence, put it on a rollercoaster, and then change it into a little person riding a giant centipede as it zooms along the rails. For them, they’re in control of a movie with an unlimited budget.

Me? I can think about the rough shape and size that an apple might be, the associations I have with the concept of an apple, and sense if there’s any connecting threads between the empty space where the apple might be and other things inside the inky black of my mind. It’s not making a movie, it’s more like echolocation.

Which is to say I’ve become very adept at sensing the potential in the ideas, phrases, and connections that I encounter. Explaining them, at least in the early stages, to others is always hit or miss. But when people see the finished product it all clicks.

With that in mind, let’s think of the creative process as sort of three parts: the fuse, the fuel, and the force.

The fuse is inspiration. It’s the open door beckoning me to walk in. I find this comes in infinite forms. It might be sitting straight up from sleep at 3am to scribble a single phrase, finding a dialogue loop stuck in my head, or simply seeing something seemingly mundane that makes the floor drop out from under me. I’m always finding lit fuses, these things that interest me. But if I don’t follow them fast enough they’ll leave.

So I keep my eyes open for shiny things, always have a notebook or app to capture these scraps and scribbles in, and use them to create an idea bank to pull from any time I sit down to write. The best cure I’ve found for writer’s block is a folder full of hundreds, or even thousands, of prompts tailor-made for whatever interests you!

The fuel sustains someone’s interest. It’s the subject matter. But it’s also how the approach you take to the subject matter. For instance, whatever I am writing about (say bisexuality) is written about through the lens of something seemingly unrelated (like ramen). If you write for long enough, you’ll eventually encounter the point where these two concepts meet. And that primes people for the force of the explosion that follows.

The force is what it sounds like. It changes people. It can be messy. You might not like it. But it’s undeniably powerful. And the force is something that always has to be manually adjusted to match the fuel and the goals. It’s not cookie cutter, it’s bespoke. Every explosion needs to do different things. So the force could be anything from a confession, a question, or a joke. As long as it’s ringing in my ears afterwards, it’s worked!”

Who or what are your artistic influences and inspirations? 

“I’m hugely influenced by Rube Goldberg machines. Or you could call it chaos theory.

Basically the idea that, from the moment we’re born, nothing we see makes sense. It’s not what we expect would, could, or should follow on from anything before it. But it does!

And so we constantly try to make it make sense. Sometimes we see enough of the pattern that we can trace certain things back to their inciting incidents and our understanding grows. Other times we may go for extended periods of time just feeling like it’s all random.

And the thing is, whether life is inherently ordered or ultimately chaotic, we’re here living it. We’re jumping back and forth like cats hunting lasers pointed at the ground. Sometimes we cynically tell ourselves that we will never be able to hold the light. Other times we jump and land just right and, you know what? Nothing could ever convince us, in that moment, that the red dot was anything but firmly under paw.

In terms of specific artists, I’m drawn most to people whose work is probably totally unlike the things I make: Anis Mojgani, Yayoi Kusama, Alok Vaid-Menon, Yoni Wolf, Piet Mondrian, Takahiro Kurashima, Søren Kierkegaard, Mathias Kom, Mark Rothko, Kurt Vonnegut. And probably the entirety of the anime genre because its existence so often hinges on every emotion being turned up to eleven. I guess maybe I just like loud people who feel a lot? I might steal that and use it to describe myself later!

But art isn’t a blueprint. There’s no answer sheet to life. The power of all this isn’t in getting things right, it’s in failing with a smile. Finding something that makes you want to try again a hundred thousand times.”