Jon Campbell was born in Northern Ireland in 1961. Based in Melbourne since the age of three, Campbell has been exhibiting since the mid 1980s. His practice has explored vernacular language and popular culture through painting, drawing, sculpture, artist books, neon light works, installation, large scale public art projects and musical performance. His work celebrates the language of the everyday, and is grounded in the slang that Australians do so uniquely well. His most recent text based paintings and prints find the artist delving further into his exploration of colour, form and tone, with the role of language moving from aesthetic focal point to subtle painterly device. Snippets of conversation and vernacular words and phrases are transformed using the conventions of formal abstraction to both confuse the original function of the words and to elevate them to a pictorial object.