Vispo and Visual Projects

My work in visual poetry explores the porous edge between word and image. Whether through collage, diagram, or experimental typography, I am drawn to the spaces where reading becomes seeing, and seeing becomes a form of reading. These projects do not treat “poetry” and “image” as separate modes, but as interleaving practices that continually mine the threshold between them.

Published Project: Eye Movement, Steel Incisors, 2022

Published in June 2022, Eye Movement (Steel Incisors) is a vispo sequence generated in tandem with – and in the form of a creative response to – the experience of undergoing EMDR to deal with the traumatic memory of witnessing a fatal road accident in childhood. EMDR makes use of bilateral stimulation as a dynamic process through which to effect a form of internally visualised narrative reconstruction, enabling the client to process trauma. Eye Movement, a form of constraint based visual-kinetic sensation- processing generates an unusual relationship between text and image. ‘The grain of film captures a granular trace of motion, images teetering between a flicker of childhood and its fearful disappearance and, in the movement of the eyes, the reader is drawn into rhythmic therapy while the poem’s deeper magic reaches other levels of consciousness. Sunderland innovatively expresses the pain of memories that were never made but in their absence exert a traumatic rupture; a space of gradual discovery where ‘Hearse follows ice cream van’ and ‘in the veins of time’ we find ‘new material to shape’.’ (David Spittle)

Published Project: Oneiroscope, KUP, 2023

Published in May 2023, Oneiroscope (KUP) is a conceptual experiment driven by surrealist methods of creation and assemblage. In a way which parallels my previous work, text and image interact with each other here in indecipherable ways. The restrictions of lockdown, and the influence of my PhD research are clear here – this is a book in search of an impossible object and glimpsed through the fractured perspectives of an array of talismanic influences, noticeably Breton’s Nadja and the film Max, Mon Amour. There is a deliberate attempt to confront restrictions of form, time and space inherent in the book’s shape and its fragments of drama, film, poem and lockdown diary, including captured dreams.

“Prepare to be dunked in film. Here’s a poetry book, yes it is, that drags you back a century plus, to Paris, or some version of it in Northwest England, and forces you to watch a new thing called cinema. A thing so arresting, so shadowy, that it knows its future might well include making people forget it’s so young. What a trick Stephen Sunderland has pulled to make the irrational look static, almost normal. Well, someone did lock him in our house recently, didn’t they? Imagine an English in 2023 casting old Surrealist bones and looking real with it? Almost unbelievable, how assured this work is.” -S.J. Fowler, English poet, writer and performer.

Published Project: Refrains, Steel Incisors, 2023

Published in August 2023, Refrains (Steel Incisors) takes my textual-visual experimentation further along the lines of surrealist assemblage in pursuit of answers to questions related to the theme of practice as research. Still in the fallout of pandemic trauma, this project explores Félix Guattari’s last work, Chaosmosis, in which he attempts to illustrate the machinic paradigm of desire (as outlined in his collaboration with Deleuze) through further granular description. A dense text indeed! – and one which provokes and engenders twice as much as it distils… The resulting vispo collection here – named Refrains after Guattari’s own nomenclature for ‘new filiations’ – derails itself early by its invocation of surrealism, so that by the conclusion it resembles a surrealist children’s book which has swallowed a post-apocalytic survival guide.

“In Sunderland’s dystopian-surreal visual and textual assemblages, we are the machines, the machines are dying, and our insides are nebulae. With deadpan-poignancy, its reportage of near-future failure, Refrains is a microcosm, an eco-Covid planetary factory, that projects the shiny flesh of the stars. In this ‘meathook galaxy‘ where everything is fetishised and the intellectual is coupled with the simple and childlike, glitter is sprayed all over our absurd and precarious position in the universe to illuminate the performance of consciousness and desires dancing à la Guattari.” – Vik Shirley, author of The Continued Closure of the Blue Door

Other Visual Projects

Notes for a Revolution – These 38 diptychs are the product of a micro-flânerie in which a tiny area of garden becomes the precinct for a surrealist-influenced suite of meditations on time and the manifold conditions that feed revolutions, both personal and collective, archaeological and kairological. The tiny, accidental collisions of surface debris recorded in these photographs serve as a historiographical prism through which to manifest a surrealistic supra-poetics of material narrativity – one which channels as it does so, impulses born of frustration with the current and ever-intensifying crisis of our planet. Extracts have been published in Canda’s Ice Floe Press and in Shuddhashar, Volume 37 – the Surrealism Issue.

Hostile Dancer – “To attempt an autobiography is to attempt a trick mirror: the moment one speaks, the self has already changed shape.”
—Michel Leiris

Autobiography often assumes a coherence that may never have existed, a steady self to be retrieved and arranged into meaning. Yet what if such a self is always provisional—less a fixed point than a shifting relation, a series of gestures rather than a singular voice? If memory falters and language distorts, what kind of form might best reflect this instability? Hostile Dancer approaches these questions through the use of found business diagrams—tools designed to impose clarity, direction, and resolution. In their original context, these visual frameworks serve as instruments of control, mapping decisions, quantifying value, structuring purpose. Here, they are repurposed not to stabilize but to unsettle. If a life were to be read within them, it would not progress cleanly from one quadrant to the next, nor resolve into a strategy for coherence. Instead, it might fragment, loop, contradict itself—suggesting not a self mastered through narrative, but one continually refracted and reconfigured.