Layers of Time: Susan Moxley’s Homage to Island Life
At this year’s Collect Art Fair, Susan Moxley’s textiles drew visitors back for repeated viewings. Represented by Jenny Blyth Fine Art, her work offered a striking contrast to the bustling energy of the fair, viewers recognised the quiet depth of her stitched narratives, imbued with stillness, history, and an intimate connection to place.
Moxley, an internationally recognised artist born in South Africa, has spent forty years between the UK and the Greek island of Kythera. Her textiles are collaged from vintage, handwoven fabrics - home-spun goat hair, sheep’s wool, cotton, and linen dyed with natural pigments from the island’s minerals and flora. Over time, she has gathered these materials, giving discarded fabrics new life, layering them into abstract landscapes that reflect both the physical terrain and the memories embedded within the cloth.
Susan Moxley, Palimpsest, Home spun and handwoven goat hair, sheep’s wool, cotton & linen dyed with natural pigments, flax & thread.
In works such as Palimpsest and Darned Landscape (Lead Image), fabric is pieced together like a painter’s canvas, then stitched with narrative in vintage thread. Each work holds echoes of past use, honouring the time and labor of the women who wove these textiles on homemade looms. Water Woman I, with its layered threads and forms, explores the island’s precarious relationship with water, depicting the female body as a vessel - both a literal and symbolic container of life.
Susan Moxley, Before the Journey, 2024, Goats’ hair, sheeps’ wool, cotton and linen, hand-dyed with natural pigments, spun on homemade looms, thread.
In today's story, we share a transcript from the presentation that Moxley gave at the Collect Fair, offering an insight into the hard work and time of the women that live on the Greek island she inhabits, and her subsequent approach to superimposing these stories and emotions onto the fabric in her work:
Collect Presentation - Saturday 1st March, 13:30, Jenny Blyth Fine Art, East Wing E7, Somerset House:
For over 40 years I have lived for several months a year in a small village on the Greek island in the Ionian. Outside our house there is a stone bench beside the road that catches the cool evening breeze, where the village women gathered. It was here that they shared their village stories, wisdom and myths with me, while their arthritic hands crocheted, repaired or shelled beans.
They told me of the harsh years since the Depression of the 1920s when many (mostly men and boys) emigrated from the island. Those that stayed, lived entirely off the land, growing their own food and rearing their children and animals, shearing, spinning, dying and weaving cloth for sheets, clothing, woollen blankets, flax sacks and olive sheets.
At the top of our village there is a pond where they collected clay to make domestic vessels or to seal the flat roofs of their stone houses or coat the walls of their wood burning ovens. They harvested bullrushes there in the spring for baskets and migratory birds stopped off for water on their way to and from Africa.
One evening soon after we arrived in the village, I asked Georgo my neighbour, what I do with my rubbish- he said “haven’t you got a spare room in your house?” I looked at him disbelievingly- “vegetable waste” he said, “goes to the animals, paper you burn- tins, bottles and old fabric you keep safely until you need it”
I have watched village life changing from a time of hard physical work when everything was recycled and valued. Now, life is so much easier, they no longer need to carry firewood in great bundles on their backs from olive trees in the valley or walk their wheat-laden donkeys to the threshing floor. They have discarded their old hand-woven textiles and chipped ceramics bowls for commercially made substitutes, got rid of their looms. The tight communal activities and festivals with song and dancing are now few and far between- or for tourists who stumble over the complicated footwork of their dances.
Susan Moxley, The Harbour
I did listen to Georgo and since then, I have found and kept discarded handwoven fabrics in the spare room in my house. I have created these textile ’paintings’ with the old, well-used functional fabrics woven by the women on the island- each tear and darn tells of their stories and labours over the years.
Each of my pieces is a palimpsest. As an artist, I have altered, superimposed, re-contextualised, while each still bears the traces of their earlier use. I carry the old narratives into the present, imposing my own, but always being aware and respectful of the women who wove them.
Susan Moxley, Violin Woman, 2024, Violin case lined with vintage wool, thread.
When I found a discarded violin case, I was immediately reminded of the ancient clay Cycladic female figures I know so well from the Cycladic Museum in Athens and the Ashmolean in Oxford, where the caption below the display refers to them as violin shaped women. Their use is not known but their abstracted simplicity with small breasts and hips, suggests a connection to fertility.
The connection between Women and pitharia/amphora/ vessels has been a recurring theme in my art practice over the years - woman as container- container as woman.
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Ships are always referred to as female vessels because they protect and contain the sailors at sea.
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We are vessels or containers, in the womb for our babies.
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In my Water-women series the women become amphora-like containers.
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My ceramic violin women have taken on their shape of the violin, which itself is a vessel to resonate the sound as the bow draws over the strings. They fit into the violin case, and so, they become contained.
So, like the Cycladic figures they simultaneously embody the image of woman, the womb, the creation of life, and the link between the spirit, the music and human worlds.
There was a bow in the case I found, with small carved ivory and mother of pearl pieces holding the horsehair in place. Surely the DNA of the horsehair, the elephant ivory and the shell -all once living creatures must play some part in the sound of the instrument? The simplicity of the violin shape and the horsehair of the bow gives each piece a sort of musical silence. Others have hand spun flax, wool and cotton tying them closely to my textile works.
The more I worked on the figures the more I saw the link between the island village stories and their crafts, their work and musical traditions, their close link to nature, their religious beliefs, the myths, which all contribute to their deep feeling of identity and belonging.
Susan Moxley, Woman with Folded Fabric.
I have made these ceramic women shaped vessels to carry the weight of the island- women’s labours: - their crafts, their myths, their identities- a bolt of fabric, a bundle of fire wood, a cooking bowl, a sack, a scythe, a loom weight, branch and plant, their music - and a bird - the dove is the iconic symbols of peace, love and harmony - a mother - the Madonna - Aphrodite.
Katerina, sitting on the bench one cool evening, told me with a mischievous smile that off the beach where we swim are 2 small uninhabited islands, which are the island’s proof of Aphrodite’s birthplace. “Those rocky islands are the testicles of Uranus the great Titan and god of the sky,” she said “which were cut off in rage by his son Kronos and flung into the sea, and from these enormous testicles and the foam of the mother sea, Aphrodite the mythological goddess of love and beauty was born and floated onto the shore”- Botticelli-like, I visualised. There are the remains of a Minoan settlement there, clay fragments in the cliff and on the summit a suggestion of a Minoan temple built in her honour. The ancient symbol of Aphrodite is - the dove.
I saw first-hand a beautiful cycle of work, play and rest in the lives of those women sitting together on the bench in the evenings, which we have lost. They allowed themselves the time and stillness to reflect and share their daily lives and activities, directed by the weather and changing seasons – a stillness which my ceramic pots have - a quietness and reflection.
My ceramic women are slab built or coiled, bisque fired then waxed, sometimes they are re-fired in a saw dust kiln. They have an earthiness, an honesty, stillness and timelessness and a soul. As in the textiles they hold the glitches, repairs, the imperfections and finger-marks of the maker, like a Palimpsest they tell a new story, and at the same time one of the myths, craft, labour and identity, and a deep feeling of belonging and community of the women I have known and respected in my village. They taught me that my belonging, as an artist, is contained in me, like a vessel, and these textiles, prints and ceramics are the expression of my deep and meaningful journey.
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Further Information:
Susan Moxley:
Jenny Blyth Fine Art:
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: Susan Moxley, Darned Landscape, Home spun and handwoven goat hair, sheep’s wool, cotton & linen dyed with natural pigments, flax & thread.
All other images courtesy of Susan Moxley and Jason Warner, Firefly Studios © 2024