The Cameron Twins

The Cameron Twins are a collaborative artist duoof identical twins who work together in a range ofdifferent media including screen print, digital montage,photography, casting, sculpture and installation .Theirwork has an overall strong and garish style using anoversaturated bright colour palette to create a surrealquality. The vivid colours and child-like naïve aestheticwith chaotic ensembles of images allows them to workplayfully, exploring the ideas surrounding childhoodimagination and dreams within their art practice. These montages and prints incorporate old paintings,photographs, notes and drawings collected from their ownchildhood belongings. The process of using these then actsas a visual conduit to their past and childhood memories.They draw upon a shared sense of nostalgia which is thenexpressed through their practice, suggesting they are alsocollaborating with their past selves. The print process is a very important element of theCameron Twins’ practice, as it allows them to explore theidea of repetition, doubling and mirroring, which relatesdirectly to their personal experience as twins, and theprocess can create a strange unsettling quality. Hand pulling their own screens is a key part of theirpractice, and the outcomes can be unique, imperfect anduncontrollable, which is an added quality in their workcreating a fun, child-like and often primitive characteristic. Printing by hand can in itself be a playful process, and thechallenges of printing in multiple layers, different materialsor sizes and then the addition of stencilling allows them tocompose new, complex compositions and images. The Cameron Twins’ practice incorporates many familiar,recognisable, fun images and pop-culture references fromchildhood, such as Barbie, Trolls and My Little Pony .‘We enjoy using this popular imagery in our sculpturesand prints as they add a playful and witty quality to thework and adds to the connectivity of our art across agesand social confines whilst still remaining personal andanecdotal’. The often familiar subject matter and the brightand juvenile colour palette used in the work can create amisleading cheerful aesthetic which then juxtaposes withthe more sinister tones and darker imagery often revealedunder closer inspection. The artists want the viewer to question the effect ofnostalgia on their own memories and past experiences,and to scratch away at what might, or might not, lie justbeneath the surface.Their vibrant sculptural practice involves creating castsof old, discarded toys and childhood treasures and strongpop-culture imagery to create new ‘toy forms’. Again, thesesculptures start to merge childhood memories and familiarobjects in an unsettling way whilst remaining visuallyplayful. They have an overall bright and balloon-likeappeal and a happy aesthetic, and they are a key elementof the installation work, adding to the surreal quality andimmersive experience of the Cameron Twins’ work withinthe exhibition space. The Cameron Twins are exclusively managed by West Contemporary