Laird at Work
He arrived in Montreal in 1965 amid the excitement of preparation for L’année d’amour, Expo’67, and worked as a freelance exhibition and display artist. He has produced artworks in glass, bronze, paper and wood.
In 1991 he moved to a small mill town and purchased a 20,000 square foot building, built in 1928, of first-growth Douglas Fir. He dismantled parts of the building to provide his new medium, with which he continues to create ‘wood assemblages’.
"I am challenged and inspired by the aged wood, and aspire to work as easily with wood as though it were a pencil, so I can scribble and doodle until there’s something worth strengthening and polishing.
"The wood compositions are the result of my having randomly cut and cut again an assembled panel (which I have prepared) of tongue and groove wood pieces. I paint, scrape, wax and otherwise tamper with the material as the process proceeds, guided by a limners’s eye. I finish with coats of wax.
"This process is an ongoing effort to conjure something retinal and cerebral to appear alongside the spiritual representation that is the art indigenous to this area. I mine for those refinements. My effort is to acknowledge without emulation and seek to isolate and further distill the irreducible elements of my eurocentricity."
The Art of Laird Campbell by Grenfell Featherstone
The wainscot from an old hotel, the faded water-stained and sun-blanched keel from a derelict boat, some old fencing—these things are and are not what they seem.
Sawn into shapes and fitted together into abstract mosaics, they take on new life as the sinuous curve of a hip that is, and is not, posed in front of a cubist backdrop of deconstructed reflections. They become totems set against a jigsaw puzzle of sky and forest. They create an angular architecture that slices shapes out of meticulously random assemblages of grained weatherworn chips of repurposed junk. An Arthur Erikson building that is not there at all is reflected in a pool that is not a pool and whose surface is not of the angled walls behind it. The hulls of overturned dories are piled like whales on a beach that merely satisfies the eyes’ need for a beach.
The profile of a face, a mask, a figure, buildings, a landscape, a table⎯all these images are so shrewdly abstracted and constructed out of such unlikely materials that their emergence, serene and innocent, creates a tension and irony that is almost metaphysical. (T.S. Eliot when writing of the poetry of John Donne described a metaphysical image as when “heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence [intellectual vigour] together.”)
His images leave the particular behind and resonate with something universal and transcendent. What more could an artist want?