Do Campo uses colour and pattern to make glorious, rich, and technically complex paintings that draw attention to trees and our relationship to the trees that surround us; encountering a specific tree species can teleport us to another time and place.
 
Trees have the capacity to thrive and become at home in locations where they may not naturally occur, arriving by wind, animal carrier, or human hand. Lilac Hour focuses on the histories and presence of introduced flowering trees across the temperate and subtropical Australia.


Statement from the artist:
“I’ve recently been working across two studios, one in Meanjin/Brisbane and the other in Gadigal/Sydney. There is a particular temporality between these two locations in the summer (the one-hour difference heightens my awareness of it, but it isn’t about daylight savings).

It’s about the fact that Jacarandas flower a week or two earlier up north, that evening skies are bluer down south, that the fruit bats return to the urban spaces earlier above the state-border.

Because I was commuting every week over the summer, my body became acutely aware of shifts in flowering time, foliage colour, the rhythm of trees, daily companion species, and this in turn, made me aware of many other flowering trees and rhythmic cycles of the Australian seasons.

This body of work is about sensing and documenting that slowly revealing temporality between the temperate and the subtropical fringe; that lilac hour”