Oasis of Glass

Profile: Barbara Camph

Published on JMU newspaper: The Breeze: https://www.breezejmu.org/culture/oasis-of-glass-how-one-womans-trash-is-another-womans-artwork/article_07f34287-2366-43e1-a69a-4415e02f836c.html

Barbara Camph sits at her cluttered desk filled with a variety of glues, copper wires, screws and bolts, scrap paper, rulers and four Chinese takeout boxes, each containing color coded pieces of untamed glass. Within this sea of sharp objects, plastic bags and pliers, Camph combines the miscellaneous into her life’s work—mosaics and stained glass.

She grabs a handful of already cut pieces of glass from an old cat-litter bucket under her desk and uses her mosaic nippers to cut them into even smaller pieces.

The rest of her studio acts as its own art exhibit, a museum made up of chaos and color. The walls of her sanctuary are covered with glass roses, mosaic lamps, hanging tulips, old-fashioned cars and abstract shapes and mirrors. Her studio is flooded with color and light as the sun shines through the light turquoises, sunset oranges and yellows, marble sages, pastel pinks, deep sea blues and “Barbara purples.” Each piece is distinctly vibrant, funky and creative, with the ability to illuminate and bring together every room it’s placed in, just like Camph.

Camph smooths out the individual pieces of glass using a scraping tool and places them along the border of her mosaic panel. She outlines her next mosaic, a rendering of Harrisonburg’s First Baptist Church, with a blue border and outlines the church with orange and white squares. The rest of the mosaic panel remains blank, with only instructions written in Sharpie, indicating where to glue each color of glass.

Once a panel is completed, she’ll display the next panel of the series, the prepped church piece, in Oasis, an art gallery downtown. She hopes locals will fill in the empty display with glue and glass to help contribute to her “Community Mosaic” project that celebrates Oasis’s 25th anniversary.

“Every community she’s a part of…she does creative things to get people involved,” one of Camph’s lifelong friends, Sarah Sikew said.

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Camph, 77, is a mosaic and stained glass artist, with her work displayed at Oasis. She calls herself a “gypsy” due to her nomadic lifestyle. Born in Richmond, Indiana, she grew up in Germany, went to boarding school in England, and cruised around California, Portugal and Panama before ending up in Harrisonburg in 2012.

Although Camph’s mother was a painter at Oasis and her father was a German art connoisseur, Camph didn’t begin creating stained glass and mosaic art until her 20s, and later made it her career when she and her husband moved to Portugal in 1995. She sold her art at Portuguese craft fairs.

“We went to every single craft fair and found every art festival,” Camph said. “Over the years, I was fortunate in that I was able to join various art co-ops and organizations, even though I wasn't Portuguese. And that was sort of a battle, but not a battle. I just had to be persistent.”

She was later invited to be part of the National Irish Craft Fair in Dublin that takes place every year.

Other than the craft fairs, Camph used her art as a vehicle for connection, enriching the communities she was a part of with her creativity.

In Panama, Camph crafted stained glass windows for a local church, but she left due to her husband's health; she returned later to finish it. While there, she also encouraged the local children to recycle creativity by making a costume out of plastic bags and parading around the community.

“She would reach out to the local community and work with them on whatever level they were to help pick up litter and help put stained glass windows in their church and things,” her younger sister, Buffy Ostlund, said. “And she would make local friends and learn the language.”

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Camph has made a prominent artistic impact in the Harrisonburg community. When she found out there were 60 different languages spoken in Harrisonburg schools, she immediately thought, “How can we honor that?” So she went to the high school and had each student write “love” in their native language for a mural that now hangs outside of Oasis.

She has been seen at times lying on her stomach on the sidewalk outside Oasis, where she is creating a mini mosaic by filling in the cracks of the sidewalk on the corner of West Water Street and South Main Street with glass, grout and road’s rubble.

Her small art projects led Oasis’ landlord to create a clause that prohibits adding anything else to the outside of the building, which the community calls the “Barbara Clause.”

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Currently, Camph is working on the Community Mosaic for the Guinness Book of World Records with the goal of breaking the record for the most people contributing to a mosaic. She has been preparing mosaic panels by outlining the subjects of the panels in glass and leaving the rest empty for others to fill in.

The panels are displayed in Oasis, making them accessible for residents to contribute one or more pieces of glass and sign their names. Once she gets 2,000 people to work on the different panels, she’ll combine them into one large, world-record-breaking mosaic.

Camph also recently finished her “Newtown Before Urban Renewal” exhibit. The exhibit highlights the vibrant lives of the Northeast neighborhood, a traditional African-American neighborhood of Harrisonburg in the late 1940s and 1950s, before it was renovated and destroyed during “urban renewal” projects.

“She brainstormed that she wanted to document through mosaics local Black history and therefore the neighborhood history,” Ostlund said. “It came totally out of her head.”

From old photographs and interviews, she created 20 mosaic panels that represent the history and liveliness of the neighborhood during that time.

“It’s intimate in the way the community was intimate,” Joanne Gabbin, the owner of the 150 Franklin Street art gallery and host of the Newtown exhibit.

Camph hopes the 20 panels will find a home outside or in City Hall so more people can learn about African-American history in Harrisonburg.

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At her studio, Camph collects her 20 panels and glass-filled Chinese boxes and heads downtown. Her presence is scattered far and wide across South Main Street to 150 Franklin St., where one of her exhibits temporarily sits. Her other project waits to be worked on 0.2 miles away in Oasis.

There’s a spot at the entrance of Oasis that waits for Camph. Her presence is known by her earrings that dangle and the unique silver necklaces that fall down her chest. It’s known by her lingo, calling customers “poopy” when they don’t contribute to the Community Mosaic. It’s her smile that reflects countless stories and the way her laugh echoes. It’s what she’s done for the community and what she has accomplished.

It’s also her sparkly, purple hair.