Susan Stockwell
Susan Stockwell is an established international artist working across sculpture, installation and textiles. Her practice explores themes of eco-feminism, materiality, climate change, displacement, migration and colonial behaviours. Her art employs the material culture of everyday domestic and manufacturing products, such as upcycled computer components, maps, money, textiles and toilet paper. She transforms these seemingly banal products into exquisite, compelling artworks. In seeking to reconnect an object’s past, its related history and materiality with contemporary issues, she underscores these materials’ urgent interconnection to collective memories, desires and ecological shortfalls; aspects that expose and challenge inequality and injustice.
Susan’s interest in the politics of feminism and the body has led to a series of Dress Sculptures, the most recent of which are Europa 2023 and Territory Dress, 2018. Territory Dress was commissioned by the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and is now on permanent display in the exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance. Maps that reference Dutch colonial history are fashioned into the shape of a regal dress, and a small model boat and maps of significant territories are concealed inside the neck, womb, and train. In 2019, Susan made a film from Territory Dress that explores the sculpture and juxtaposes it with archival film.
Money Dress 2010, made entirely from used paper currency, was shown in the exhibition, Money Talks Art Society & Power at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 2024/ 2025.
This series of sculptural dresses has been featured in recent books including Money Talks Art Society & Power, Our Colonial Inheritance & 50 Women Sculptors.
Europa is in the exhibition Cassini's Map of France. An encyclopedia of the territory at the Hôtel de Soubise/Archives Nationales, Paris, France (14th October 2026-1st February 2027). Europa reflects Susan's time spent living in France and questions historic events, including the war in Ukraine, Brexit, mass migration & the climate catastrophe. A time traveller looking out to what? Standing in a sea of water and carrying a rucksack, she bears the weight of an unpredictable future. Meticulously crafted and subtly revealing, she is both beautiful and full of foreboding. Colonial Dress is on show in the exhibition Postcolonial? at the House of European History in Brussels, Belgium (until 14th March 2027).
Sail Away in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (Hyperlink Festival, London, 2013) consisted of hundreds of small boats made from old paper currency, travel tickets and maps, forming a large flotilla that snaked along the floor of this voluminous space. The used money notes had been handled by many thousands of people over their life spans, and the scratches, pen marks and rubbed away textures all contributed to the piece's sense of collective social history. During the exhibition, 800 people came and made and added their boats to the flotilla.
Sail Painting at the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-upon-Avon 2015) was a large-scale site-specific installation that hung in the front of the theatre atrium spaces. The result of Susan’s year-long residency there, it consisted of 32 appropriated and handcrafted sails, which hung at various angles in the multi-level building. Seen from different vantage points, the viewer felt they were walking inside a three-dimensional abstract painting.
Flood (York 2010) was made from four tons of recycled computer components, arranged in a huge cascading conical shape inside the altar area of St Mary's, a deconsecrated 13th-century church in York. The computers were dissected, and their innards were exposed, revealing the underbelly of the machines we take for granted; an autopsy of our consumer society. Susan chose these everyday 'commodity' materials because, in her words, they contain 'stains of existence' and act as ready-made signifiers, which I sculpt and interweave in ways that delicately reveal their obscured politics, environmental harm, and hidden beauty.
An important element in her large scale installations is that the materials are often borrowed to make the work and returned to the recycling company/sponsor to be recycled once their exhibiting lives are over, thus forming a circular economy.
The Curator and Architect Grace Cheung describes the work's gently revealing nature -
"Accumulation, transformation, detritus, debris, everyday materials are all recurrent themes in Stockwell's work. Meticulously hand-crafted, the benign sublime beauty in the work belies the devastating effects of our culture and our role in shaping it. Look more closely, and one is confronted by a cultural urgency of global proportions. Political and cultural colonisation, globalised waste and consumption are reconfigured by Stockwell's work into a new festering ecosystem of meaning that slowly seeps like the rising ocean level.” From the text for the exhibition 'B-side Ecology', MIMI Space at the Hong's Foundation for Education and Culture, Taipei, Taiwan, 2008.
Gallery owner Patrick Heide, who represents Susan, describes her work in the following way: "Su has become a central position in the program, despite and I assume also because many of her projects are so courageous that they are more suited for institutional exhibitions. What I admire most about Su's work and her approach is her integrity. Su tackles very diverse and controversial contemporary topics such as gender issues, wounds of the colonial past, immigration and civil liberties, yet manages to remain sincere and balanced, even fair. Su's choice of medium and process is usually complex and carefully considered, often historically charged; the message is always calm and powerful.”
Susan is best known for her site-specific installations and dress sculptures that have been exhibited widely, including; TATE Modern, London UK (2013), Archives Nationales, Paris, France (2026-27), Ashmolean Museum Oxford, UK, (2024-25), House of European History, Brussels, BE (2026-27), Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam NL (2020 & 2022-), the Museum of London (2021-2022), Warrington Museum and Art Gallery (2020/21), the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (2015),
Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2012), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2010, 2005, 2001). Her work is held in international collections including: the University of Bedfordshire, Black Rock Investments, Yale Centre for British Art, USA, the National Army Museum, London and the Stichting Museum van Wereldculturen & Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. She has also taught extensively and taken part in residencies and projects in Europe, America, Australia and Asia.
She is developing new ways of working in print, recently receiving a DYCP Arts Council of England grant.
As well as working regularly with Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, Susan is supported by The Artists Agency. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors (FRSS), gained an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1993, and lives and works in London, England.
New Year, New Newsletter update, January 2025