Artist Profile: Mata Kamp

Art is a primal feeling for Mata Kamp, an urge she cannot suppress. We met years ago as ex-pats residing in Muscat, Oman. Here, for the first time, I interviewed her.

Her collections are "the result of an urge for emotional exploration” regarding what Kamp calls “matters of concern.” When pressed, she explained, “For example, my collection regarding the refugee crisis was born out of my need to combine the Islamic Culture, which I loved during my years in Oman, with difficulty Western cultures and refugees [must face together].” Integration of disparate societies requires strength to not judge one another, vision for solidarity and hope for a united peace.

Originally from and currently in Greece, she spent one year in London and three years in Muscat. Her artistic influence derives from books she’s read, locations she’s visited and people she has met. She credits her desire to explore her feelings to a French Private school run by strict Catholic Nuns and uptight routine. She said it created an “unbalanced semi-conservative semi-revolutionary view” of the world.

When Marcel Duchamp argues that art is about expressing ideas and about the importance of what is happening in the artist’s mind, he’s speaking directly to Kamp’s creative spirit and intellectual mind.

Kamp's most recent collection focuses on “matters related to the Greek European culture, which [previously promoted] liberty and sadly nowadays [represents something] strict and conservative.” For this collection, she uses markers and pens on paper or acrylics/oils on canvas, transfers them into Photoshop and develops patterns. When I asked her about her transition between paint and digital she reminded me that she studied graphic design and, therefore, "it is a natural transition."

A natural transition, stemming from a primal urge that asks the world, "Where is the unity?"

Follow Mata on Instagram

—-

Originally published on my previous website, Love Letters to Art, on May 1, 2018.