Barbara Campbell Thomas makes paintings and collages that create an imagined visual representation of the collision between experienced reality, remembered reality and embellished reality. Her work revels in high-keyed color, the juxtaposition of shape and pattern, and the literal inclusion of bits of daily ephemera—colored cardboard from a cracker box, tin-foil or a child’s worn t-shirt. These nearly chaotic, adamantly physical images are a means of locating some kind of ecstatic, exuberant, ever unfolding space analogous to our dense existence.

Campbell Thomas’s work has been exhibited nationally, in such venues as the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Additionally, her work has been favorably reviewed in Art Papers as well as The International Exchange for Poetic Invention.

Campbell Thomas received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 and her BFA from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. She has been an artist-in-residence three times at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia, as well as at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Additionally, she was a fellow at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut.

Barbara Campbell Thomas lives and works in Climax, North Carolina.