Jenelle's

Biography

Jenelle Leigh Campion was born to a Czech, Polish and Sicilian family rooted in Chicago, IL. She grew up in New Jersey, as her immediate family moved there when she was a small child.

Her practice as a visual artist grew out of working as a set designer in both high school and college. Through the theater arts she learned how color and shape can be used to create a sense of environment. An undergraduate degree in Art History and a minor in American Studies from Rutgers University gave her broad exposure to the history of how people have spoken with symbols. Enrolling in the Health Choices Holistic Massage school after graduation gave Campion practical experience in the art of holistic healing, in addition to her earlier training.

In 2003 Campion went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to work as a volunteer teacher at the Red Cloud Indian School, where she served as a kindergarten aide and art teacher for grades K - 8. Working in very rural country on a Jesuit mission school and living alongside the Lakota people for three years helped her to deepen a prayerful relationship with her spirituality and a larger sense of community. Upon leaving the reservation in 2006 she moved to Chicago, where her parents had relocated. There she spent a year training in Cranial Sacral Sacred Journey Therapy, an advanced form of shamanic healing, at the Beyond Wellness Institute. During this time she traded massage for guitar lessons from local folk singer Shelly Miller and started to consciously develop her practice as an artist.

Campion moved to New Orleans, LA, in 2007 and was immensely inspired by the city, where she experienced people creating art to engage, inspire, remember and reflect. Living in a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River exposed her to the presence of a river interweaving itself into the identity of those who live on its shores. While there, Campion began painting in an abstract style, using dots and lines to develop an emotional Morse code.

In 2009 she moved to Oakland, CA, to pursue a certification in Sound, Voice and Music Healing and a MFA degree in Creative Inquiry, both through the California Institute of Integral Studies. Inspired by her training in sound healing with luminous teachers like Silvia Nakkach and Jennifer Berezan, Campion wrote and recorded her album, How To Heal A Broken Heart, with Camper’s Rules Records in Brooklyn, NY, to reflect the wisdom she had gained about the healing power of sound. The MFA program challenged Campion to explore her own artistic process. Her MFA thesis project, Rivers, was a series of art altars celebrating interconnectedness with nature by filling in maps of rivers with her unique painting style juxtaposed with text on the side of the canvas and a shelf of found objects to the bottom. The final installation involved a sound piece made from recordings of various rivers. During this time, Campion developed a mature sense of voice, perspective and technique.

2012 brought Campion back to New Orleans, where she began painting her Beautiful Bodies and selling them in Pirate's Alley in the French Quarter. To further her understanding of archetypal symbolism, she studied with the Pacific Mystery School through a three-year meditative study of the cosmology of the tarot, which lasted from 2010 - 2013. Also in 2013, she was able to obtain a permit to sell art as part of the Jackson Square Artists Colony, where she continues sharing her creative practice both as a street artist and through her ever-evolving social media practices.

Currently, Campion is continuing to explore both her Beautiful Bodies series and her Portraits of Rivers. She has plans to begin a body of tarot card paintings based on her personal visionary experiences and maintains a song writing practie. In 2016 as part of the collaborative team Collabo Industries, Campion helped to produce the podcast Sound Philosophy which hosts discussions about the way sound intersects with our daily lives. She is now studying Faerie Wicca and Goddess Spirituality with Francesca De Grandis in her Third Road Tradition.

Campion’s work has been on display in the group shows The Elegant Line (2011) and Offering: Works of Text and Image (2011) at the Village Theater Gallery in Danville, CA; Telling Stories Through Art (2012) at the Diablo Valley College Gallery in Pleasant Hill, CA; at Circus, Circus, Circus (2012), Big Top Gallery Fundraising Show (2013) at the Big Top Gallery in New Orleans, LA; and at various group shows at Gallery Kebab in the St. Claude Arts District of New Orleans (2014-2015).

Campion has had solo exhibitions in the CIIS Minna St Gallery (2012), the Center for Spiritual Living (2012) in San Francisco, CA, and daily in Jackson Square in New Orleans, LA.