A space for healing

Charles Campbell’s, How many colours has the sea (2024) promotes collective and individual healing in a visually stimulating environment. Upon entering a darkened exhibition hall in Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the large brightly lit polychrome panels that line the walls and a delicate sculptural structure of undulating lines, that is suspended from the ceiling. As we walk deeper into the exhibition space, sounds of gurgling water—at times soothing, at other times menacing, and periodically interrupted by a loud plunging sound – enter our consciousness.

Campbell, is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer of Jamaican birth, whose work has garnered attention both at home and internationally. The concept of breath and its symbolism for healing has been a central feature of his practice over the course of several years. His methodology creates spaces for healing from the lingering effects of slavery and colonization. He envisions a hopeful future despite continuing racial prejudices and obstacles faced by people of colour. Campbell’s work can be situated within the worlds of Afrofuturism.

Fashioned of aluminum, the sizable sculpture is a homage to enslaved Black African souls who did not survive the traumatic cross-Atlantic journey. Informed by bathymetric data, the measurements of depths of water in the oceans and lakes, the sculpture mimics the submerged irregular terrain where African and North American tectonic plates meet. Campbell’s research indicates that most of those over two million enslaved souls who lost their lives in traumatic circumstances, did so in this area where many slave ships sank. Viewers can stop beneath the sculpture to contemplate the many enslaved people who tragically drowned or whose dead bodies were thrown overboard. Now the intermittent plunging sound of the audio component resonates most deeply. “The ambient audio…. compresses 400 years of transatlantic crossing, two million lives, into a handful of punctuated moments”, Campbell explains in an interview with Rungh. Regarding the sculpture he remarks, “[h]ere we are standing underneath the ocean floor with the realm of the ocean, and dead, above us. It’s made as a space to commune with them, to grieve their passing and to find solace for our own losses.”

In direct conversation with the sculpture, are the nine monumental brightly coloured panels on the gallery walls, termed “Breath Portraits”. While the sculpture honours the lives of those enslaved people who took their last breaths in the ocean, in what is known as the Middle Passage, the large panels record the living breath of their descendants and survivors, translated into vivid colours and a variety of patterns. They stand tall as symbols of healing and hope.

Prior to making the “Breath Portraits”, Campbell engaged with members of the Black community in guided meditations. He asked them to recall their ancestors, while recording their breath. According to the artist, for most people this was a very visceral experience rather than remembering an actual event or a specific person. The breath portraits are derived from audio-spectrograms from the breath recordings in the form of bands of colour. We notice that no two panels are alike in their coloration or patterning, the same way as no two individuals are the same. Some are marked by firm vertical lines; others have horizontal bands softly fading into each other and running down the length of the portrait. Still others, look like magnified organic matter in vibrant colours. The artist affirms, “our breath, like our voice, has its own signature, frequencies that are present or absent.” He chose to “represent between 1/10 and 1/100 of a second of breath as at this time scale each person’s breath is most differentiable. The resolution, scale (linear or logarithmic), frequency range, colour spectrum and thresholds change with each portrait.” Ultimately, the artist selects how best to visually represent these voice recordings, meaning Campbell adjusts the digitization characteristics as well as colours and patterns in the work to reflect each person’s breath and personality. For him, these are like individual portrait paintings, representing the unique likeness and character of each sitter. Interestingly, when he knows the person, finding the right combination is easier. “Mostly I proceed intuitively until I have some sense that this is right for the person whose ‘portrait’ it is”, he states.

The artist has created various bodies of “Breath Portraits”, like the one for the show titled Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity at the Surrey Art Gallery (2023). For the current show he has opted for a new medium and a larger scale. Whereas for the Surrey exhibition, the artist employed light boxes, for the present show, he chose C-prints on aluminum panels. In both cases the works possess an arresting luminosity.

Breath has been a subject in Campell’s practice for many years. However, in 2020 it gained greater prominence – a year that was punctuated by two pivotal events. “In 2020 breath became so fraught, it was a source of contagion and then George Floyd’s last words, echoing those of Eric Garner, made the suffocating realities of being Black into a potent and commonplace slogan”, the artist describes to Rungh.  “I can’t breathe”, the last words of many members of the Black community, spurred on the artist’s work with breath, as did the COVID-19 pandemic, which assaulted people’s respiratory systems and disproportionately took the lives of African Americans. Campbell continues, “[m]y impulse was to focus on the presence and beauty of our breath rather than lurking violence and oppression.” On a very personal level, the artist found the simple act of sitting down with members of the Black community listening and recording their breath, as having “created a healing space”. He affirms, “its impact on my practice has been profound.”

Campbell’s engagement with breath also reflects his interest in challenging traditional notions of time and the ability of breath to connect us with all living things past and present. He explains, “[t]he focus on breath, its site and moment of exchange also overlaps with my interest in our perception of time. Many meditation practices use breath as a tool to bring us into the present, but the oxygen we breathe has been gradually accumulated over millennia. So, in situating ourselves in the present, we are also communing with thousands upon thousands of years of biological processes, plant, fungal and animal life, on this planet.” An earlier work that deals with this theme is the artist’s circular sculptural piece titled Breath Cycle, which was first shown in 2022 at the Campbell River Art Gallery as part of the exhibition The Chorus is Speaking. As he notes on his artist website, this work “gestures towards a deeper past, connecting the oxygen we breathe to its production in symbiotic, multispecies communities of ancient lichen.”

Campbell is also interested in “lungs as a site of exchange between the internal and external environment and how this relationship is fundamental and keeps reappearing the morphological similarities between natural structures – lungs, trees, lichen, coral, circulatory systems, rivers etc.” For example, at the exhibition Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo (2021/22) held at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the artist exhibited his large sculpture Tree: Finding Accompong—which as its title suggests, looks like a tree, but is also a reference to the bronchial structure of a human lung as well as the forked shapes of slave yokes.

Campbell also decided with this show, to touch on some of the spiritual traditions of West Africa and the wider African diaspora, namely the ancient Yoruba belief system. Among its divine spirits is Olokun, the variously gendered deity of the deep ocean. The number nine, as well as the colours blue and white are associated with Olokun, hence the deep blue of the gallery walls and the milky white of the aluminum sculpture, according to the exhibition’s wall text. When the artist was asked in the interview with Rungh about the significance of the number nine, he stated how Olokun’s cape is often described as having nine colours, without specifying which ones. Campbell translated that idea into a “loose symbolic reference” to the nine multihued panels. So “the sea deity holds the space” but more importantly he argues, “the columns also stand in for the ancestors as well, because of the way they are produced” – recalling their ancestors while their breath was recorded. Another reference to the number nine came from one of the participants during a public event related to the exhibition. She described that in the Yoruba tradition, the dead souls after their passing, associate with the living for nine days, before they move on to the next world.

One more component of the exhibition, deals directly with personal loss and allows for healing. In the corner of the exhibition hall are several headphone audio stations, where the artist provides a guided meditation around overcoming loss, in a soothing voice, using breathing exercises. The recording starts thus: “Close your eyes and bring to mind something significant that you have lost. This may be an object, a home, someone close to you… Or maybe something internal – a feeling, connection or something about yourself.”

What makes Campbell’s How many colours has the sea into such a powerful work of art, is that it allows the audience to commemorate and honour, drowned enslaved souls, while at the same time celebrating living descendants and survivors through their breath of life. The artist has turned breath, something so fraught in our recent memory, into a positive and healing phenomenon and presents it in mesmerizingly coloured panels vis-à-vis a delicate memorial sculpture. The idea of breath resonates deeply with this viewer, as it brings the past and the present together, and promotes healing and closure. In this show, Campbell offers spaces for collective and as well as individual healing. Breath is vital to the release of trauma and loss, and it absolutely proves our interdependence.