Text by Ksenia Jakobson

Do you know that feeling when, amidst the chaos, things just fall into place? For a brief moment, the silence becomes louder than the noise, and everything seems perfectly clear, as if someone turned up the saturation slider all the way, and you can feel rather than think. In those moments, time stretches out so much it practically stops; a million tiny movements happen at once, yet somehow, you manage to grasp each one. Through your hazy vision, you paradoxically see so clearly that you catch all the details, and for a brief moment, everything is just perfect.

Every now and then, at a party, if you’re lucky, there’s a moment like that. A door opens, and you are thrust into this dreamlike, surreal realm. It’s almost like those hypnic jerks, but you don’t snap awake; instead, you just keep free–falling. It’s as if the movie of your life and your friend’s respective movies merge into one epic fictional universe where every joke lands perfectly, every step is in sync, and nothing is cringe. You notice how perfectly your friend’s glasses suit them, how irresistibly cute the corner of their mouth looks when they smile. You spot someone’s shoes at the door, and those are the most incredible shoes you’ve ever seen. The dog under the table transforms into this adoring creature, and its eyes seem as if it has lived a thousand lives, about to spill the wisdom of the universe into you. The cars outside move at the perfect speed; the world is moving at the perfect speed – that’s almost like it’s not moving at all.

But those moments never last; you cling to them, but like everything, they fade. The noises become increasingly overwhelming; someone steps on your foot, you take a sip of your drink, and it’s way too bitter. It’s as if gravity gets switched back on, and all the bodies and objects floating in space crash to the floor. Just like that, in a moment, it’s over. You notice an eyelash stuck on your friend’s glasses, and you fixate on it, unable to follow the conversation because the only thing you can think of—how to get it out. The fabric label on your dress’s inner seam starts rubbing your skin, like the tiniest, nastiest saw. You start sweating too much; the voices get too loud, and nothing feels right. All you want is to go back to that blissful equilibrium. Sometimes, the door swings both ways, and you can fall back into that perfect vacuum for another brief moment; more often than not, it doesn’t. It is what it is.

To me, Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell’s work is about moments like that—transitional states between perfection and chaos, those instances when the switch is flipped. It’s about grasping the fleeting moment, as if taking a snapshot with a tiny silver digital camera—a staple of nights out in the 2000s. But, of course, in the morning, the pictures from the previous night look nothing like the way it felt at the moment.

As if layering frames of a movie into each other, Campbell creates dense, rich images that capture the sense of simultaneity, where colors represent volume, as in the level of sound, and different materials and textures denote temporality. The inherent warmth of textiles softens the rough edges, making even the unsettling strangely appealing.

In a way, her tapestries are like a non–linear comic strip, where color is as much a main character as the figures that haphazardly pop in and out of the frame. And depending on how you look at them, they can appear perfect, chaotic, or perfectly chaotic.