Bio

Melissa English Campbell is a fiber-based visual artist whose work bridges the tactile discipline of weaving with the fluid expressiveness of painting. Working on a large floor loom, she creates tapestries from hand-painted warp, exploring the tension between structure and disruption.

Her process reflects a deep engagement with visual language, translation, and transformation. Woven compositions shift and relocate painted imagery; patterns fragment and reassemble, evoking how meaning is constructed, disrupted, and reformed. The work is rooted in a sustained inquiry into migration, both physical and perceptual, and the layered ways in which memory, place, and identity manifest in form.

Each piece begins with a warp of white yarn threaded in precise alignment. Onto this grid, Campbell paints portraits, landscapes, and abstractions drawn from lived experience and observation. Once woven, the painted strands subtly misalign, reframing the image and embedding it within a geometric grid. This process of translation—between surface and structure, intention and distortion—reveals the material and conceptual interplay at the core of her practice.

The loom becomes both a tool and a collaborator, introducing an element of unpredictability. The resulting works reflect an ongoing meditation on impermanence and adaptation, where control and chance coexist, and where new meanings emerge through the act of making.

Campbell holds a B.S. in Environmental Design from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Studio Arts from Kent State University.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (UK), in Seoul (South Korea), Como (Italy), and New South Wales (Australia). In the U.S., she has shown at Blue Spiral 1 (Asheville, NC), the Riffe Gallery (Columbus, OH), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles (CA), the Columbus Museum of Art, the New Bedford Art Museum (MA), the Museum of Texas Tech University, the Handweaving Museum (NY), and Troppus Gallery (Kent, OH). She has participated in major art fairs and exhibitions such as the CAN Triennial (Cleveland, OH) and The Other Art Fair (Chicago), and her work has been featured in Surface Design and Fiber Art Now. Campbell is a recipient of the Award of Excellence from the Ohio Arts Council.

She lives and works in Ohio.