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 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 & 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.

Europa is in the exhibition Cassini's Map of France. An encyclopedia of the territory at the Hôtel de Soubise/Archives Nationales, Paris, France (October 2026 - 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).

Territory Dress was commissioned by the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, and is 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 of past seafaring imagery.

Money Dress, 2010, made entirely from used paper currency, featured in the exhibition, Money Talks Art Society & Power at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, (2024 - 2025). This series of sculptural dresses has featured in recent books including Money Talks Art Society & Power, Our Colonial Inheritance & 50 Women Sculptors.

www.susanstockwell.co.uk

To enquire about Susan's work please email: mark@theartistsagency.co.uk