Private view: Thursday,12 November 2026, 6-9 PM
Exhibition dates: 13 November 2026 – 9 January 2027
Make-do and Mend – a familiar phrase associated with domestic craft – also recalls the British government’s Second World War campaign encouraging people to repair, reuse and repurpose textiles in response to wartime shortages. Born of necessity, the campaign anticipated contemporary approaches to sustainability and recycling. Susan Stockwell’s exhibition extends this meaning beyond the material act of mending to encompass the social and political histories embedded in objects and materials.
Make-do and Mend, Stockwell’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, brings together new works exploring the intersections of power, wealth and control with ecology, domesticity and politics of everyday life. She juxtaposes maps and paper money, bearing the authority of the state and the apparent objectivity of the cartographer, with worn textiles and garments that preserve traces of everyday life.
In Tineis Erosus, Stockwell embroiders moths across the holes of an old blanket inherited from her family. This year’s unusually early arrival of these insects prompted her to consider their sensitivity to environmental change and their capacity to predict the weather. By stitching their images over the damage they have caused, she grants the insects a form of authorship. The blanket becomes both a celebration of nature’s ability to adapt and repair, and a reminder of its fragility in the face of accelerating ecological change.
A free-standing dress sculpture Eldorado, central to the exhibition, is constructed from old German banknotes, evoking images of paper money being transported in wheelbarrows during the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. Once a symbol of economic value, the currency became almost worthless. Transformed into a garment, it recalls the fragility of financial systems and the social inequalities that can emerge from economic instability.
Mapping and territory have long been central to Stockwell’s work. In another series, she stains paper dressmaking patterns with coffee, a commodity historically bound up with colonial trade, tracing the shapes of continents and economies. By transforming these templates, Stockwell reconsiders the forms through which geographical territories are represented, bringing them into dialogue with the body for which the patterns were originally designed. The worn, ageing paper highlights the vulnerability of both: the body as a physical presence and territory as a construct shaped by political boundaries and systems of power.
From carefully embroidered moth-eaten blankets and stained tea towels to a life-size dress made from obsolete banknotes, Stockwell reworks objects marked by use and history, reconsidering the systems through which we understand the world. For Susan Stockwell, mending becomes an act of care and resourcefulness, while acknowledging vulnerability and the possibility of repair.