A box of floating milkweed, the sound of planes flying overhead, and disks of rye grass roots overturned on the gallery floor.  

These works and many other sensory delights compose  “Field Guide,” the Oakland University Art Gallery’s current exhibition from local artist, Susan Goethel Campbell.

Campbell’s diverse body of work can be experienced in the OUAG until Feb. 22.

On Wednesday Jan. 28, campus and community members gathered in the OUAG to hear Campbell discuss her pieces, creative process, and to take questions from the audience for the gallery’s Artist Talk series.

Campbell earned an MFA in printmaking from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and went on to show her work internationally. She was also one of 18 artists chosen for the Kresge Artist Fellowship, granting her funds that helped make portions of “Field Guide” a possibility.

“Her artwork comprises various bodies of work: printmaking, video, landscape images and weather-based artwork,” said associate professor of art and OUAG director, Dick Goody.

“Since much of her work is data-driven and quasi-scientific, it only seemed appropriate to have a ‘field guide’ to document her work – the exhibition and [her] 120 page catalogue of the same name,” Goody said.

“Field Guide” displayed landscape prints on wood block, an audio/visual portion, prints using environmental elements, and small-scale paintings.

“[I’m] marveling at what’s out there. I never stop marveling at how we can engineer the landscape,” Campbell said of her searing, bright orange prints depicting a city viewed from above.

“What is heat?” she said, explaining her interest in the concept of “heat islands,” where a city becomes so warm that it creates it’s own weather pattern.

“I wanted to make the colors as hot as I could,” she said of this particular work, called “Woodblock prints with hand stenciling.”

In addition to large-scale prints from wooden blocks, Campbell discussed working with HVAC specialists and collecting air filters from different locations, which she quantified and translated into prints, illustrating a place’s respective “filthiness.”

Campbell did everything from grow rye grass in post consumer waste containers, resulting in concentric rings of grass root, to making a time-lapse film of the city of Detroit in 2010, documenting its weather from a building high in the city skyline.

In the projection room of the OUAG, Campbell looped a film she made that shows every aircraft to pass over her home during the course of several evenings. 

“All of the work I do comes out of curiosity,” she said.

This was evident, as she took the light pattern from overhead airplanes, strung them together into flickering beams and projected them onto a Lucite box filled with floating, snow-like milkweed.

“I work with the setup,” Campbell said. “I don’t control what happens.”

Much of Campbell’s work embodies this belief with her use of natural elements, like air particles collected from filters or a series of prints she made by hurling black walnuts at canvas until they left their mark.

Campbell said that her work is a way to “connect [herself] to the ground,” and that she views the idea of a landscape as a process rather than a picture.

Campbell’s diverse and creative use of materials, mediums and techniques lend to a tactile and sensory experience in the OUAG and provide an interesting point of perspective on the natural world.