Blog Post 2. October 2017 - a-n The Artists Information Company

A Blog about Professional Development MENTORING

This Professional Development Bursary was to pay for mentoring from curators to help me develop and contextualise my practice within current curatorial thinking. Aiming to examine and reflect on my work and make future plans for directions and potential outcomes.

Here are some images of the works that Caroline thought I should develop in the context of proposals for future exhibitions built around my ideas concerned with issues if trading histories, geopolitics, migration and cultural mapping.

Soon after our first meeting I took part in a group exhibition called Boîte-en-Valise: Generator which toured to Venice during the Biennale, May 2017. Then in October 2017 the exhibition went to Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, USA. Boîte-en-Valise: Generator encouraged transportability of practice and the nurturing of collaboration and cross-fertilisation of artistic practice. Each artist transported the means to generate their work in Venice and Syracuse in a normal sized suitcase, which went as luggage on a flight, train and bus journey and was taken from the suitcase for presentation and development in the two venues. Including sculpture, performance, video, photography and sound as well as collaborations, interventions and conversations. I made a version of Sail Away in Venice and a piece called Dream Boat in Syracuse, which was a collaboration with the Syracuse based Cuban artist Abisay Puentes. This was a totally new piece, based on an idea I’d been nurturing for a while about boats as metaphors acting as carriers for our dreams, vessels for our adventures and often symbolic of the transition from the material to the spiritual world. Abisay drew text in charcoal on the wall behind the boat telling the moving story of his journey from Cuba to North America. The old clinker boat was borrowed for the show. People were encouraged to sit in it and tell or write their dream, leaving them behind in the boat on a piece of paper. Dream Boat was a popular and successful piece and collaboration. It was great to work in this unexpected way and make a totally new work that was very much the result of a collaboration between two artists from different continents and yet at the same time contained ideas and elements that were very individual to us both.

I felt that this second stage of the exhibition opened up new ways of working for me that the mentoring was helping with.

Susan Stockwell

Susan Stockwell is an established international artist working across sculpture and installation. Her practice is concerned with questions of materiality, feminism and social history. Susan's art employs the material culture of everyday domestic and manufacturing products, such as toilet paper, recycled computer components, maps and money and she transform 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 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 is 'Europa' 2023, shown at the Hotel d'Astier Art Centre, Forcalquier, France and at TEFAF Art Fair, Maastricht 2024. 'Territory Dress' 2018 was commissioned for the Tropenmuseum in 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, 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 is currently on show in the exhibition 'Money Talks: Art, Society and Power' at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. These works are featured in recent books, 'Money Talks: Art Society & Power', 'Our Colonial Inheritance' and '50 Women Sculptors'. Susan Stockwell also offers professional mentoring to aspiring and practising contemporary visual artists and art professionals. She has been a practicing artist for 35+ years and has extensive experience and knowledge in studio, professional and teaching practice. She has exhibited in museums, galleries and alternative spaces worldwide, taken part in collaborative & social practice projects, residencies and received awards, grants and commissions. She is also developing new ways of working, and recently received a DYCP Arts Council of England grant to learn to make prints as a way of of developing new skills and expanding her practice to making it more resilient, commercially viable and adaptable to current contexts. Susan is best known for her site-specific installations and dress sculptures that have been exhibited widely, including; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (2024-25), Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, NL (permanent), Warrington Museum and Art Gallery (2020/21), Royal Shakespeare Company (2015), TATE Modern (2013), Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2012), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2010, 2005, 2001) and 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 & V&A Museum, London and The House of European History Brussels. She gained an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1993 and lives and works in London, England. www.susanstockwell.co.uk

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