Highland Dress
2021
Highland Dress is a life-sized female dress sculpture composed of pink Ordnance Survey maps of the Scottish Highlands. This work is part of a series of life-size dresses constructed from antiquated maps and currency that relate specifically to aspects of British history. This particular dress is composed of Ordnance Survey maps of the Scottish Highlands, addressing the issue of English colonization and occupation of Scotland over 300 years.
Together with the pink colour, the imaged contours of the Scottish Highlands suggest bodily form.
‘Stockwell delivers a visual blow to English colonization and occupation of Scotland over 300 years. Using military maps to create a woman’s dress sends a double message of war and politics being dominated by men in Western history. The strongly posed representation of feminism battles against male denial of power and suggests that men can only settle disputes through wars.’
Quote from Review of Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art at Katonah Museum of Art - International Journal of Multicultural Education, Vol.12/no 2, 2012.
Susan's ongoing series of Dress Sculptures crosses the boundaries between art, fashion & craft, questioning our need to separate and categorise. Their beautiful, finely crafted details and tactility draw the viewer in, and then they can read the deeper, layered conceptual questioning in the works.
Exhibitions:
Collaroral Drawing 6, APT Gallery, London 2026 Curated by Bella Easton
Matisse and Contemporary Paper Art, Rheged Art Centre, Penrith, UK 2022
Artist-in-Residence Exhibited Works, Pinsent Masons, London, UK 2020-2022
If you Lived Here you'd be Home Children's Museum New York, USA 2016
Mind the Map GALLERIE F 15 Punkt Ø NORWAY 2014
First Cut Manchester Art Gallery & Platt Hall Museum of Costume 2013
The Creative Compass Royal Geographical Society & IBG London 2010
Paper Tiger One Canada Square, Canary Wharf 2008
Publications:
Susan Stockwell's Map Dresses Trendland, Cyril Foiret 2025
The First Cut Catalogue for exhibition Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester 2013
Sculpture at Canary Wharf: a Decade of Exhibitions 2011
Susan Stockwell: Economy, Dresses and Maps - Art Cartography
Mappamundi_Art_Cartographie Guillaume Monsaingeon, see p. 26/27
Mappamundi in Toulon - Terra Cognita
The Creative Compass Catalogue, Royal Geographical Society
Mapping Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art, Sarah Tanguy, for the Katonah Museum of Art
