Laetitzia Campbell — On Your Way Home

Exhibition text by Letizia Agostini

Poem by Laetitzia Campbell

On your way home, What did you find?

An old tree to shade your troubles,

That woman, Who made your life so humble,

The orange sun sinking,

Your peaceful self enjoying,

Thinking, reading, breathing,

Just breathing.

On Your Way Home unfolds as a quiet meditation on memory, inheritance, and the poetics of return. In this body of work, Laetitzia Campbell traces the invisible threads that connect the living to their histories, weaving together gestures, stories, and emotions that persist beyond the boundaries of time.

The exhibition moves gently between presence and absence, between what is passed down and what is lost along the way. For Campbell, memory is not a fixed repository but a living fabric, one that stretches and frays, carrying with it traces of both tenderness and rupture. Her practice finds its roots in the domestic gestures learned in childhood from her mother, the measured rhythm of needle through fabric, the slow accumulation of time through touch. These acts of making are more than technique; they are a language of continuity, a conversation with the past. The exhibition’s genesis lies in a story passed down from Campbell’s father, a memory of walking home as a schoolboy in Jamaica. What remains of that moment is not its event but its mutable atmosphere: the scent of metal in the night air, the cool stillness of the road, the quiet awareness of being both close to home and infinitely far from it.

Through this story, and through her own experience of returning to a changed homeland after years abroad, Campbell reflects on the fragile architecture of belonging. Home, she suggests, is not a place we inhabit, but a memory we carry - constantly rewritten as we move through life. On Your Way Home begins with an exploration of inheritance: the objects, images, and gestures that are handed down across generations, and the invisible emotions that accompany them.

Campbell understands inheritance not as possession but as continuity, a form of transmission in which meaning is quietly transformed by each new custodian. In her work, the boundaries between the tangible and intangible dissolve. The nature of fabric recalls the weight of memory but also its fluidity; the repetition of stitching mirrors the repetition of remembering. Her gestures are deliberate yet instinctive, echoing a learned choreography.

Campbell’s signature use of free flowing “loose threads” can evoke many things: threads of thought, timelines, the roots and origins of things, unfinished possibilities, connections, things that remain unspoken, and above all - movement in recollection and mood.

In Sombre Metamorphosis, Campbell weaves this reflection into an intimate study of transformation. Drawn from the abstracted silhouette of an old photograph of her father, the work becomes both portrait and mirror. It speaks to the fluidity of identity: how life unfolds, reshapes, and softens us. What seems fixed, like a captured image, is revealed instead as a fragment within an ongoing becoming, where the self is never still but quietly in motion.

Oh sweet and painful memory to go back to:

You, a book, the shade.

Nothing shades you now,

Not the tree, Nor yourself.

In Bright Night Sun, Campbell extends this reflection into a shared space of passage. The work’s elongated form and the expanse of ground at its base evoke the feeling of a path unfolding before the viewer: an invitation to step into the landscape, to walk alongside the artist through the terrain of memory. It recalls the “tree that shades your troubles”, a familiar image of shelter and stillness, where personal and collective memories quietly converge. The warmth of recollection gives way to the ache of distance, a realisation that the shade once offered by memory has dissolved, leaving the self exposed to the present. This tension lies at the heart of Campbell’s reflection on belonging and displacement.

For Campbell, belonging is not synonymous with location but with recognition: the fleeting instant when something - a scent, a voice, a flicker of light - feels known. Yet these moments are transient, dissolving as quickly as they appear. Her work meditates on this instability, on the impossibility of return and the longing that persists despite it. The story of her father’s journey home becomes a metaphor for this universal state of in-betweenness: the awareness that what we call home may exist only as memory, unreachable yet ever-present.

On your way home you found nothing,

But regret,

Love,

And pain.

Campbell’s exhibition affirms the fragile beauty of transience. What remains is resonance tinged with regret and the understanding that the act of remembering is itself a form of continuity. In On Your Way Home, embroidery becomes both method and metaphor. Each stitch marks a passage of time, an imprint of presence. It is through these slow gestures that Campbell transforms recollection into material form, translating the invisible language of feeling into texture. Her work exists in the interval between past and present, holding the tension between what endures and what fades. Ultimately, Campbell’s practice reveals that inheritance, belonging, and displacement are not separate conditions but facets of the same human experience, the desire to locate oneself within the shifting fabric of time. On Your Way Home invites the viewer to pause within that fabric, to trace their own threads of memory, and to consider how the stories we inherit continue to shape the lives we build. For Laetitzia Campbell, the journey home is not linear but cyclical, a continual returning, not to a place, but to the quiet act of remembering.

LAETITZIA CAMPBELL

(b. 1996, Paris)

Laetitzia Campbell is a British-French artist of Jamaican heritage now based in London. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (BA) and the Institut Français de la Mode (MA), and worked for four years in the luxury industry in embroidery before returning to her own art practice. On your way home is her first solo exhibition.

LAETITZIA CAMPBELL - ON YOUR WAY HOME