Tom Campbell

About the work

Tom’s 2026 Biennial work considers architectures of language and translation, in particular how language functions as a technology. Presented at Bookrunner, a context where texts arrive and depart, writers are pressed up against each other and multiple concurrent times exist together, Tom’s work seeks to open up spaces for experiencing multiple conflicting temporalities simultaneously, and gestures to ideas of how we come to know things, what remains unknowable, and what gets lost or transformed in translation.

The work was developed while Tom was in Taiwan and Sabah, Malaysia, researching histories of language exchange and reconnecting with his mother’s homeland. Tom wishes to thank his grandfather, Datuk Richard Maning and Yu-Ying Chuang for providing translations of his poems suddenly you become strangers and a book about fighting.

About the artist

Tom Campbell is a poet and multidisciplinary artist of Kadazan/Scottish heritage, who grew up in Kamberri/Canberra. His work explores muscle memories across histories, with a particular interest in time and language as materials open to endless stretching, compressing, embedding and reconfiguration.