Barbara Campbell, 2005 The Midday Movie and the History of Australian Painting, 2002, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo: Brenton McGeachie Fleas or the Menses of Lizzie Borden, 1994, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Heidrun Löhr

Barbara Campbell is an Australian artist who works primarily in the medium of performance. Since 1982 she has worked with the specific physical and contextual properties of a given site, be it art gallery, museum, atrium, tower, radio airwaves and now the world wide web, in developing and presenting her works.

After completing undergraduate degrees in fine arts and art history, Barbara Campbell was awarded a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 1998. She has undertaken residencies at Griffith University, Queensland, The University of Melbourne, The University of Sydney and the Australia Council studios in Santa Monica and New York. In 1994 the NSW Ministry for the Arts awarded her the Women and Arts Fellowship and in 2004 she received one of four Fellowship grants awarded by the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Prior to 1001 nights cast, Barbara Campbell’s most recent performance/exhibition was The Grimwade effect at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne in October-December, 2003. This project was the result of her Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne in 2002. The Grimwade effect was reconfigured at the CraftACT Gallery, Canberra for Metis in May 2004.

Between 1996 and 2001 Campbell developed and presented work at various sites around The University of Sydney. These came together in the survey exhibition Flesh Winnow, in 2002. The accompanying collection of essays of the same name was published jointly by the Department of Performance Studies and the Power Institute: Foundation for Art and Visual Culture of The University of Sydney.

Although performance art is by its nature ephemeral, artefacts and objects created in and around Campbell’s performances are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia; Griffith University; Queensland University; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the State Library of Queensland and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was also commissioned to create Cameral, a public art work for the ACT Legislative Assembly, Canberra in 2001.

The Grimwade Effect, 2002, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. Photo: Patsy Vizents Inflorescent, 1999, The Macleay Museum, University of Sydney. Photo: Neil Roberts The Diamond Necklace Affair, 1991, Walsh Bay Pier 4/5, Sydney. Photo: Heidrun Löhr