Artists > Susan Goethel Campbell
Susan Goethel Campbell creates multi-disciplinary work that considers the contemporary landscape to be an emergent system where nature, culture, and the engineered environment are indistinguishable from one another. Central to her practice is the collection, documentation, and observation of seasonal change and ephemera in both natural and artificial environments. Her work is realized in several formats, including installation, video, prints, and drawings, as well as projects that engage communities to look at local and global environments.
Campbell's Lost City series is inspired by a trip to the Caribbean and by the subject of underwater cities, in particular the fictional island Atlantis. Each Lost City print is composed of two layers of Japanese paper printed in colors from birch plywood and perforated with tiny hand-punched holes. The hues and wood grain patterns evoke aquatic or snow-covered environments, and the perforations suggest networks of lights that delineate settlements, urban grids, thoroughfares, and bridges. Some of these holes only pierce the top layer of paper, exposing the color of the printed paper underneath; other holes go through both layers, revealing the bright white of the backing board.
Campbell earned her MFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New York Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Davison Art Collection, Wesleyan University, CU Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, the University of Michigan Special Collections Library, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.
Campbell's Lost City series is inspired by a trip to the Caribbean and by the subject of underwater cities, in particular the fictional island Atlantis. Each Lost City print is composed of two layers of Japanese paper printed in colors from birch plywood and perforated with tiny hand-punched holes. The hues and wood grain patterns evoke aquatic or snow-covered environments, and the perforations suggest networks of lights that delineate settlements, urban grids, thoroughfares, and bridges. Some of these holes only pierce the top layer of paper, exposing the color of the printed paper underneath; other holes go through both layers, revealing the bright white of the backing board.
Campbell earned her MFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New York Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Davison Art Collection, Wesleyan University, CU Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, the University of Michigan Special Collections Library, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.
