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Susan Stockwell’s practice is ‘primarily concerned with transformation’.

Stockwell employs the disposable, industrial and domestic materials that pervade our everyday lives. She works most often with paper, but rarely in the standard form of the blank, virgin page. Rather, the paper she employs is heavily inscribed with its intended use - maps, dress-making patterns, toilet tissue, books, calligraphy paper - or a past use that designates it as waste - coffee filters, tea bags, torn packaging. She chooses these materials because, in her words, they contain 'Stains of Existence' and 'act as ready-made signifiers' which she can sculpt and interweave in ways that delicately reveal their obscured politics and hidden beauty.

The processes of working with materials - accumulating, stacking, sewing and quilting manipulate and transform, sometimes minimally affecting the material in sensitive and subtle ways or highlighting characteristics, such as paper's ethereal and fragile qualities. For example, Stockwell made a body of work from toilet tissue (1990’s) -sponsored by Kimberly-Clark. The translucent floating sheets became light tunnels and huge ponderous stacks, alluding to monumentality and ancient civilisations, yet they were temporal and fragile, not easily recognisable as toilet tissue.

Her work comes into being intuitively and experimentally through a practice in which process, subject matter and materials are equal elements interwoven to create a layered multiplicity of meaning.

In the American magazine Art on Paper the art critic Anat Rosenberg writes:

'Stockwell's works are indeed accumulations-of the debris of everyday life. However they conjure up additional implications of accumulation, the strongest being the desire to appropriate everything from luxury goods to land to people. And in mapping out her chosen locations, Stockwell reminds us of the cost of this far-flung impulse'.

- Museum and Gallery Reviews July/August 2000.

And Carole Tulloch describes her work in Crafts Magazine Jan /Feb 2006 altered states -

'The essence of Stockwell's works is a crossing of boundaries between craft and fine art. She works in collage, fiberarts, sculpture, installation and sewing, and is happy in this 'in-between world'. Jill Baird, curator of Education and Public Programmes at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, has argued that the traversing of traditional borders, whether they are concepual or physical, is the beginning of creating transformative spaces'- and this is where Stockwell operates'

Stockwell exhibits in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. She has had exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, venues in China, Taiwan, America and Europe. She has taught extensively in the U.K. America and Taiwan and is presently a part-time Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in The School of Art and Architecture at the University of East London.