Susan Campbell
scampbell@ocadu.ca
Instructor, Faculty of Design
Faculty of Design
Faculty of Design
Susan Campbell is an interdisciplinary designer working at the intersection of design advocacy and intervention, as well as lens-based media and sculpture installation. She obtained an MDes in Design from York University (2025) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media & Design from OCAD University (2012) after extensive studies in design and digital media in Ireland.
Campbell investigates signs and patterns of urban intensification as played out on development sites, parking lots and public sidewalks. Her work frequently explores physical mapping practices as a means to interpret and reflect on the design dynamics found within the urban landscape, confronting issues caused by the intensification of development. Using codes such as floor plans and clearance zones, Campbell re-organizes space into performative zones. In addition to exhibiting across Canada and internationally, Campbell has received numerous grants from Canada Council of the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.
Solo Exhibition: Enclosure + Exclusion: A Visual Treatise
DesignTO Festival 2022 | Artscape Youngplace, Toronto, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2022
Campbell’s process of apprehending inscriptions and boundary marks found on-site explores societal patterns of impermanence and exclusion perpetuated by technological developments in the production of space.
Solo Exhibition: Palimpsests of Place: Echoes of the Blank Slate
Craft Council Gallery NL, St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador
Published: December 31st 2021
The overarching theme of Susan Campbell’s exhibition Palimpsests of Place considers how urban environments are manipulated and shaped.
Solo Exhibition: The Palimpsest of Faded Texts
Critical Mass, A Centre for Contemporary Art, Port Hope, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2021
How we talk to one another through messages, notes, posters, and official signs can be mapped from our environment. During the residency the community collected various kinds of signs and symbols found throughout Port Hope: sprayed onto sidewalks, painted onto walls, attached to window panes, stapled onto hydro poles. Together they form a palimpsest of what we value and preserve.
Solo Exhibition: We Made (Pretend) Plans
Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, Missouri
Published: December 31st 2019
Collectively, the works in this exhibition attest to a mapping of socially contentious zones. They invite viewers to examine the signs, patterns, and social behaviors that define cities which are in a state of rapid urbanization and continual transition, due in part, to the age-old relationship between capital and city building.
Solo Exhibition: Zonification
Gallery A, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2016
Oshawa is transitioning away from heavy manufacturing towards service-based enterprises, prompted by growth in the education sector and improvements to the transit infrastructure, and accompanied by residential development in the north and infill construction of condominiums and warehouses downtown.
Solo Exhibition: Tracing Ambiguity
XIT-RM Emerging Artist Project Space, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2015
The Art Gallery of Mississauga presents a solo exhibition entitled “Tracing Ambiguity” in the XIT-RM space. The exhibition documents a diverse range of tactics used to explore the potential of semiotics found in “non-places” such as parking lots, or threshold areas where nothing seems to happen. The tactics help the viewer re-imagine alternative spaces within confined parameters, in order to escape prescribed patterns.
Solo Exhibition: PARK(ing) Day | Pop-up Garden Oasis
Port Credit BIA and City of Mississauga, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2012
In order to really feel involved in PARK(ing) Day, we need to participate in the experience, to believe in the idea that for one day only the street really does become an extension of our civic space. We need to experience the diverse range of social applications that public space can offer and to combat the idea that the conventional parking spot serves the automobile only.
Solo Exhibition: Sitelines: An Exploration of Physical Mapping Practices
Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto, Ontario
Published: December 31st 2012
MFA Thesis Show took place at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, 1082 Queen Street West, Toronto, April 24th – May 6th 2012.
Site Lines: An Exploration of Physical Mapping Practices
Published: June 28th 2012
My practice is driven by the way “the Plan” is used as a stand-in for place, and by our tendency to identify with a plan at the cost of our connection with place - with its physicality, its historic context, its role within the social fabric. I reflect on my own complicity as a graphic designer in creating the kind of clean, seamless visions that are fine-tuned to appeal to a target demographic. I discuss how the designers’ extensive array of media is so successful at “holding the focus steady” (Latour 1986: 5) on the projected world, that it masks the underlying rules that enable and perpetuate that projection. The artworks engage with the theme of spatial hyper-rationalization, and speak to the inescapability of Cartesian time-space. My site-line interventions engender a brief sense of freedom and agency into an otherwise hyper-rationalized environment, and suggest a fluidity between interior/exterior space and private/public space.
Reconfiguring the Voice of Typography
Published: June 28th 2009
Graduate Exhibition: The {collective} Mechanism
Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland
Published: December 28th 2008
Abstracting the Crowd: Evolution of the crowd symbol alongside media developments
Published: June 28th 2007
Master of Design
Type: MDes
York University
Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media & Design
Type: MFA
OCAD University
Digital Media
Type: Postgraduate Diploma
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Design for Digital Media
Type: BA Honours
Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest
Teaching Assistantship - Communication Design
Type: School of AMPD
York University
Sessional Instructor
Type: Faculty of Design
OCAD University
Design Director
Orphisme Design
Partial Load Professor
Type: School of Media, Art & Design
Durham College
Critical Mass Residency Project: Palimpsest of Faded Texts
Type: Award
Critical Mass: A Centre for Contemporary Art is a Port Hope-based, not-for-profit, visual arts organization, which provides artists with a paid four-week residency in an historic mid-1850s former little train station, made possible with funding from an Ontario Trillium SEED Grant.
Exhibition Assistance Grant
Type: Grant
Critical Mass Mini-Residency: Port Hope Drift, Walking + Drawing Challenge
Type: Award
Community-led Walking + Drawing Challenge
Arts Abroad Grant
Type: Grant
Exhibition Assistance Grant
Type: Grant
Visual Artists: Emerging Grant
Type: Grant
Exhibition Assistance Grant
Type: Grant
Exhibition Assistance Grant
Type: Grant
PARK(ing) Day Installation: Pop-up Garden Oasis
Type: Award
Winning Proposal, Design and Installation, PARK(ing) Day Event for Port Credit BIA 2012. PARK(ing) Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public places. The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat. The original PARK(ing) Day concept was by Rebar.
Designing Resistance: Leveraging graphic design to combat dispossession and foster tenant agency
Type: Award
Visual Communications
YSW Tenant Union
Digital Communications
Climate Justice Toronto
CARFAC Member
CARFAC Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens
Calligraphy & Lettering Arts Society (CLAS)
National Diploma of Calligraphy
2023, Oshawa Culture Counts Professional Artist Award
City of Oshawa
2013, First Prize, VAM35 Juried Exhibition
Type: Visual Arts Mississauga
Art Gallery of Mississauga
2017, First Prize, The Nth Degree Juried Exhibition
Type: Going Solo Award
Foundry Art Centre