Associate Professor Joyce Mary Campbell

Biography

Joyce Campbell (b. 1971, New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques such as daguerreotype and ambrotype, as well as conventional analogue and digital photography, video, film and sculpture to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems.  Campbell’s interest in biological and physical systems has led her to develop a set of photographic techniques that render visible the minute and incremental emergence of complex form, be that the growth of a microbial colony, crystals in the process of formation, the migration of glaciers into the ocean or of silver from an electrode into colloidal suspension.

Campbell often works with large format cameras in challenging environments that have ranged from the ice fields of Antarctica and the flooded river gorges of rural New Zealand to California’s desert washes and urban industrial brownfields. She produces mural scale photographs that invite her audiences to immerse themselves in the environments depicted and occasionally abandons photographic negatives altogether in pursuit of her actual objects of attention: organic form in the process of emergence, and the play of raw perception against interpretation. 

Research | Current

• Photographic processes ranging from antiquarian to contemporary
• Ecology, Phenomenology, Postcolonialism, Marxist critique

Teaching | Current

Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts

Masters in Fine Arts

Responsibilities

Associate Head, Research and Postgraduate studies

Elam School of Fine Arts

Areas of expertise

Photography

Sculpture

Landscape

Ecology