Susan Stockwell FRSS

Susan's work employs the material culture of everyday domestic and industrial products, such as recycled computer components, maps and paper currency. She transforms these seemingly banal products into compelling artworks. In seeking to reconnect an object’s past, its related history and materiality with contemporary issues, her practice underscores these materials urgent interconnection to collective memories 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 sculpture. The most recent of which, Europa reflects Susan's time living in France and questions recent and historic events in Europe, including wars, Brexit and mass migration. Europa is a time traveller looking out to what? standing in sea water and carrying a rucksack she bears the weight of an unpredictable future. Meticulously crafted and subtly revealing Europa is both beautiful, and full of foreboding. Territory Dress, 2018 was commissioned by the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. 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 small model boats and maps of significant territories are concealed inside the neck, abdomen and train. A video, also called Territory Dress 2019, explores the sculpture and juxtaposed it with archival film of past seafaring imagery. It is as if the figure is remembering her history and making imaginary connections. Money Dress 2010, made entirely from used paper currency is on show in the exhibition, Money Talks Art Society & Power at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford 9th Aug 2024- 5th Jan 2025.

This series of sculptural dresses has been featured in recent books including, Money Talks Art Society & Power, Our Colonial Inheritance & 50 Women Sculptors.

Installations:

Out of Time was a major solo exhibition at Hotel d'Astier (Forcalquier, France 2013). The renaissance courtyard installation, Hot Air evoked the night sky, hot air balloons, and a miniature universe. This installation established the links between colonial behaviours, global warming, pandemics, and our fragile world. As well as the underlying deeper meanings the work is also uplifting and evoked a sense of play and wonder. Each globe resembles a hot air balloon and appears to float across the space with objects associated with global warming hanging in place of where the balloons basket; a gun, toy oil tankard, iPhone, coal basket to name a few.  For this exhibition Susan also created, Europa and showed a number of her short films.

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 hand crafted sails, made from old plastic food sacks, which hung at various angles in the multi-level building. Seen from different vantage points the viewer felt they could be walking inside a three dimensional abstract painting.

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.

Flood (York 2010) was made from four tons of recycled computer components that were arranged in a huge cascading conical shape inside the altar area of St Mary's, a de-consecrated 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. An important element in the large scale installations is that the materials are often borrowed to make the work and returned to the recycling company/sponsor once the exhibition has ended thus forming a circular economy. Susan chose these everyday 'commodity' materials because 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.

Susan's work has been exhibited widely, including; Ashmolean Museum Oxford (2024-25), Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2020 & 2022-), the Museum of London (2021-2022), Warrington Museum and Art Gallery (2020-21), Aspex Gallery Portsmouth (2018), the Royal Shakespeare Company (2015), TATE Modern (2013), 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 (Courtesy of Tag Fine Arts), Yale Centre for British Art, USA, the National Army Museum, London, The House of European History Brussels and the Stichting Museum van Wereldculturen & Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, NL. She has taught extensively and taken part in residencies and projects in Europe, America, Australia and Asia. As well as working with Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, Susan is supported by The Artists Agency. She gained an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1993 and lives and works in London, England.