Bio

Melissa English Campbell (b. 1969, San Francisco) is a visual artist whose work bridges the tactile discipline of weaving with the fluid expressiveness of painting. Using a large floor loom to weave tapestries of painted warp, Melissa’s work explores the tension between structure and disruption. 

At the heart of her work lies a continual excavation of the fragile space where child-like wonder brushes up against the edges of danger. It is rooted in early memories—beginning at age three—when she watched a distorted figure approach through fluted glass, fear and wonder mingling as she imagined a new kind of creature on the other side. Her mind had been primed for anything: that day, they had traded a remote Tennessee commune for a modern Dutch village of identical brick homes. The cultural and visual jolt was the first of many. As she grew, her formative years were shaped by moves across Europe and the U.S., each place presenting unfamiliar visual and social codes to navigate. That history and rhythm of movement and adaptation is embedded in her methods: woven structures shift and relocate painted images, disrupting and reassembling them to explore how meaning and memory are built, broken, and reformed.

Melissa’s process begins with a warp of white yarn threaded through the loom in taut, orderly rows. Onto this substrate, she paints portraits, landscapes, and abstract forms drawn from her present life in Ohio and memories of her meandering formative years. Once painted, the yarn is woven. At the loom, each strand lifts collectively with the harness but shifts individually within its heddle, subtly misaligning the image. The shuttle’s pass anchors the yarns into new positions, locking distortions into place and stamping a geometric weave pattern into the surface. While Melissa guides the painting, the loom’s motion, and the shuttle’s rhythm, the shifting imagery introduces an element of unpredictability, requiring her to relinquish control over many details in the final outcome.

Her practice becomes a meditation on movement and change, how materials shift, how meanings migrate, and how, through the act of making, new ways of seeing can emerge.

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

Her artwork has been exhibited globally, including at the Royal Albert Museum in the UK, Seoul, South Korea; Como, Italy; and New South Wales, Australia. Nationally, Melissa’s work has been shown at galleries such as Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville North Carolina, at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; San Jose Museum of Textiles in California; Columbus Museum of Craft, New Bedford Art Museum in Massachusetts; Museum of Texas Tech University; Petaluma Center for the Arts in California; Hand Weaving Museum in New York; Troppus Gallery in Kent, Ohio; Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  She has also participated in the CAN Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, The Other Art Fair in Chicago and her work has appeared in journals such as Surface Design Magazine and FiberArt Now.  She is a recipient of the Award of Excellence from the Ohio Council for the Arts.

Melissa now lives and works in Ohio.