Ai Sogawa Campbell

Lives and works in Montclair, NJ, USA

Artist statement

My work is an exploration of memory, absence, and the shifting space between nature and human experience. I began with a process-oriented practice using water, gravity, and chance to mirror the dynamism of natural phenomena, such as waves, clouds, and bird murmurations. Over time, my work has expanded into collage, photo transfer, and three-dimensional forms as I turned inward, responding to personal experiences of loss, distance, and the search for belonging. Negative space has become essential in my paintings, a way of marking presence through absence and giving breath to what cannot be filled. In recent works, I layer fragments of photographs from my childhood in Japan, journals, and materials inherited from family alongside painted forms, allowing intimate traces of the past to coexist with abstraction. The materials I use—fabric, paper, pigment, ink—carry their own meanings and histories, and through their interplay I both attempt to shift and investigate what influences our perception of value, memory, and impermanence. Rooted in my Japanese heritage and shaped by Zen Buddhism’s philosophy of time as an eternal present, my practice is a meditation on transience. In making art, I seek not only to hold fleeting moments but to create spaces of connection—between past and present, absence and presence, the personal and the universal.

Artwork