## Breadcrumb 1. [Home](/index%2Ephp/) 2. [Overview](/index%2Ephp/academics) 3. [Faculty Members](/index%2Ephp/academics/explore-faculty) 4. [Susan Campbell](/index%2Ephp/markdownify/node/3915) # Susan Campbell ![](https://ultima7-its.ocadu.ca/bios/scampbell/portrait) scampbell@ocadu.ca Faculty Information Instructor, 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. ### Works #### 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. [View Article »](https://designto.org/event/enclosure-exclusion/) #### 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. [View Article »](https://www.craftcouncilnl.ca/events/utopian-blank-state) #### 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. [View Article »](https://susancampbellartist.com/2021/07/16/community-engaged-public-art-in-port-hope/) #### 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. [View Article »](http://foundryartcentre.org/gallery-iii-archive) #### 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. [View Article »](https://rmg.on.ca/exhibitions/susan-campbell/) #### 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. [View Article »](https://susancampbellartist.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/ex_agm_-susancampbell_broch_15172-r2.pdf) #### 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. [View Article »](https://www.mississauga.ca/file/COM/Parking_Day_Summary.pdf) #### 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: October 7th 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. [View Article »](https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/58/1/campbellMRP.pdf) #### Reconfiguring the Voice of Typography Published: October 7th 2009 #### Graduate Exhibition: The {collective} Mechanism Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland Published: December 7th 2008 #### Abstracting the Crowd: Evolution of the crowd symbol alongside media developments Published: October 7th 2007 ### Education #### 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 ### Employment #### Course Director - Designing for Existing Systems **Type:** School of AMPD York University #### Sessional Instructor **Type:** Faculty of Design OCAD University #### Design Director Orphisme Design #### Teaching Assistantship - Communication Design **Type:** School of AMPD York University #### Partial Load Professor **Type:** School of Media, Art & Design Durham College ### Funding #### 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 ### Memberships #### 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 ### Distinctions #### 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