Playing with Memory: An Interview with The Cameron Twins

Childhood is often remembered as a blur of colour, play, and imagination. A time when toys, doodles, and family keepsakes seemed both ordinary and magical. For London-based twin artists Phebe and Abigail, The Cameron Twins, these fragments of the past are not just nostalgic curiosities but raw material for their practice. By reworking old toys, pop-culture relics, and family ephemera, they reveal unsettling layers beneath the surface, they explore the fragile spaces between nostalgia, memory, and the uncanny.

In this interview, we spoke about toys, tension, twinhood, and, of course, dinosaurs.

Your work often feels like you’re collaborating with your childhood selves. How does repurposing old toys, drawings, or family ephemera inform both the concept and emotional resonance of your art?

Yes, that’s exactly how we think about it! We’re always revisiting childhood through the lens of being adults. Old toys, doodles, and bits of family memorabilia carry a strange kind of time-travel quality, they’re familiar and comforting, but also a little alien when you re-encounter them years later. By bringing those fragments into our work, we’re playing around with layering memory and nostalgia with the distance of hindsight. 

We work with old pop-culture relics and toys which have meaning and connect to us personally, but we find that they also open a dialogue across the generations, and evoke excitement for all sorts of reasons in all sorts of age groups. It crosses a much broader time frame than people realise, lots of these artefacts have a long lasting presence in peoples homes, charity shops and family attics! We have become avid collectors of all things; some of the artefacts we have inherited, found in second hand shops and markets, or played with as children after being brought home from one of our regular trips to the boot fair with our grandparents.

Your aesthetic is bright and playful, but upon closer inspection, unsettling elements emerge beneath the surface. What draws you to this tension between nostalgia and the uncanny?

We love that moment when something looks sweet and inviting at first glance, but then unsettles you the longer you look. Childhood is often remembered through this glossy, cartoonish lens, but in reality it’s full of strangeness, intensity, and even darker undercurrents. By exaggerating colour and playfulness, then sneaking in surreal or slightly eerie details, we’re trying to capture that dissonance. It creates a kind of emotional push and pull: you’re reminded of innocence and light hearted fun, but also of how fragile and unreliable those early memories can feel. Fun and frightening at the same time!

As collaborators, how do you navigate different creative visions?

Our ideas often start off separately, but quickly merge because we’ve grown up with such similar visual languages. Being twins helps because there’s this unspoken shorthand, but that doesn’t mean we always agree! But we’ve now managed to evolve into a way of working where we challenge each other, but also instinctively know when something feels right for both of us. Our personal collaborative style works by building on each other’s energy until the work becomes something neither of us could have made alone. 

How do you see your practice evolving in the near future? Are there any new projects you can share with us?

At the moment we’re really excited about pushing our work further, alongside our painting and printmaking, into immersive spaces and environments that people can step inside and feel part of. Think giant toys, distorted playgrounds, or oversized dreamlike structures or spaces you can wander through.

And finally, a very important question from my six-year-old boy: what’s your favourite dinosaur and why?

We love this question! We’d probably say the Triceratops, partly because it’s such a fun, cartoonish-looking with its big frill and three horns, but also because it’s a mix of fierce and friendly. It has amazing armour and horns, but is also a herbivore so it’s not too scary! Plus, it looks a bit like toy, which feels very us!

You can follow Phebe and Abigail on Instagram @the_camerontwins

Interview by Johnny Larran, 2025.