Sonninia: Cas Campbell

Bringing together her ceramics and paintings for the first time, Cas Campbell's exhibition Sonninia emerges from a residency undertaken with Fred Levine Gallery earlier this year. The works draw on Campbell's investigations into the geology, ecology, and histories of Bruton and its surrounding landscape, weaving together a layered understanding of the intertwined relationships between deep time, evolutionary change, modern social history, contemporary life, and more-than-human experience.

The show takes its name from a variety of ammonite found among the earthy deposits within Bruton's railway cutting. Excavated as part of Victorian industrial rail expansion, the cutting reveals a rocky archive in which ammonite species act as archaeological time stamps, while also telling a narrative of technological, social, and environmental change.

Campbell was drawn to this site through her research into figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous engineer who took inspiration from molluscs to design a new tunnelling mechanism after a tunnel he was building under the Thames collapsed, and William Smith, a self-taught engineer who came to Somerset to work on coal canals in the 1700s. Smith's canal also collapsed, but he used this experience to study geological layers, contributing to his theory that rock strata occur in consistent sequences and can be identified by their fossils - something that remains one of the founding principles of geology.

Just as these rocky layers can be found and identified all over the world, so too can the railway cutting's attendant stories of industrialisation, labour, and change. Campbell builds these narratives into the materiality of her paintings, which are made with paper pulp recycled from waste cardboard used by local Bruton businesses. Campbell dyes the pulp with found pigments derived from scrap iron and copper, local clay, black limestone, and chalk limestone, before applying it to stretched canvases lying on the ground outside.

Building up pigmented layers, Campbell manipulates the pulp to form patterns, while also allowing chance environmental factors to play a role, achieving different results depending on atmospheric conditions. She also incorporates found objects and detritus from the nearby environment into her paintings, such as scraps of metal, stones, shells, soil, or plant matter, creating an archival repository akin to an excavated layer of archaeology.

Sitting in potent dialogue with the paintings, Campbell's ceramic works offer more figurative explorations of similar themes. These wall-based pieces draw together representations of local flora with plants that would have populated the seabed here in the Jurassic era, creating a time-turning elision between deep past and ecological present within each small object.

The textured surfaces of the paintings and ceramics are simultaneously lithic and organic - much like the ammonite from which the exhibition takes its title, once a living creature, now a stone marker of time. During her residency, Campbell was drawn to an ammonite from the Bruton Museum collection which has a frond-like pattern on its shell; here, as in Campbell's work, the discrete distinctions between

animal, vegetable, and mineral become part of a continuum that reaches back to the earliest depths of evolution, to the common ancestors of all living beings. For Campbell, looking back into history opens a space where our perceived boundaries between subject, object, ownership, and identity are potently dissolved, much like papery pulp from which she crafts her paintings.

Text by Anna Souter