My initial approach was primarily linguistic and formal, using my own creative practice as a research tool to explore the textual mechanics and possibilities of my theoretical findings. My actual projects came out of my engagement with some problematic local and personal histories, attempting to challenge and subvert static and totalised ideas about place and identity. One of these projects engages with archaeology in the reconstruction of a Saxon burial ground and the other with a remaking of the self (selves) confined within a reductive diagnostic language. The former explores a processual understanding of place, the latter a processual and plural idea of the self. However, the unexpected interruption of my research by serious illness and (successful) surgery fundamentally changed my approach and impacted my creative outcomes. By allowing the affect and bodily experience of this crisis to open up gaps and unravelled edges in my projects, my creative practice expanded, becoming more inclusive and multi-modal. My findings became open-ended and uncertain but more embodied and also more generative.
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Susie Campbell holds a PhD in poetic practice from Oxford Brookes University. Her poetry publications include I return to you (2019), Tenter (2020), Enclosures (2021) and The Sleeping Place (2023). Her poetry and critical writing have appeared in poetry journals such as Poetry Review, Long Poem Magazine, Shearsman, and Axon Journal; and in anthologies including The Book of Penteract (2022) and Seeing in Tongues (2023). As well as text poetry, she makes visual, sound and textile poetry. Her sound collaboration with poet Chris Kerr was the inaugural publication for Angry Starlings Imprint, 2023 and her poetry film Wound premiered at Runnymede Lit Fest in 2024.
Main Image: Working sketch made in chalk, Campbell