'Comfort' by Philip Campbell at Harrison Center

Comfort by Philip Campbell, Harrison Center, Indianapolis

Audience Participation Overdose Trauma.

Longtime Indianapolis artist Philip Campbell, most known for his wood carvings, exhibited his interactive installation, Comfort, at Harrison Center in October. The artwork consisted of a fabric-clad hospital bed surrounded by a similar colorful quilt that curtained the space around the bed. The familiar appearing patchwork design evokes the ambiance of grandma's house, antique malls, rocking chairs and prayer.

The fiber art in both components was composed of sewn together rectangular fragments from common clothing items such as denim jeans. The jeans were key, as they retained their pockets. The pockets were for the audience participation part of the post modern artwork, evoking social themes related to drug addiction such as overdose, rehab and recovery.

Inspired by hospital emergency rooms overwhelmed by opioid cases, Campbell has softened the anguish of the all too often endpoint of addiction by clothing the sterile environment in the well worn comfort clothes of people who were once patients or in narcotic withdrawal recovery. The use of quilted fabric echoes an earlier epidemic of suffering by evoking memory of the world's largest community folk art project, the AIDS memorial quilt.

Comfort in a Name.

Comfort is a metaphor for the very real phenomenon of something the artist refers to as the 'pink cloud' effect of early drug addiction recovery, where there is a feeling of euphoric well-being as the patient, surrounded by a recovery team, and perhaps hopeful family and friends, begins to shed the outer layers of destructive addictive behaviors and self-destructive rationalizations in an effort to begin the healing process. Pink clouds, like all clouds, are transitory though. The patient must be braced for the long haul and difficult times ahead.

The interactive feature invited gallery viewers to fill out memorial cards with the names of personal lives lost to addiction. Then to exchange the cards with the ephemera and paraphernalia, all too familiar to the addict, in the pockets. A 12-step plan outline or a Narcan nasal spray swapped for the name of one who has no use for such things anymore.

The comfort, then, for the many people affected by the loss of those who did not survive the pink cloud and its aftermath, is the relic of their name on paper and some old clothes. With an American epidemic as common and widespread as apple pie, no matter how you slice it, or dress it up, especially since fentanyl, they are gone.

Comfort here, is both beautiful and sad – like graveyards and memories can be, but hospital rooms seldom are.

Comfort by Philip Campbell

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025 

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