Paul scott ceramics biography examples
ABOUT
English, b. 1953, Darley Dale, Derbyshire, England
lives and works in Cumbria, UK
Paul Scott is a Cumbrian-based artist with a diverse practice and an international reputation. Creating individual pieces that blur the boundaries between fine art, craft and design, he is well known for research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue and white artworks in glazed ceramic.
Scott’s artworks can be found in public collections around the globe – including The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Norway, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, National Museums Liverpool, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn Art Museum USA. Commissioned work can be found in a number of UK museums as well as public places in the North of England, including Carlisle, Maryport, Gateshead and Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has also completed large-scale works in Hanoi, Vietnam and Guldagergård public sculpture park in Denmark.
A combination of rigorous research, studio practice, curation, writing and commissioned work ensures that his work is continually developing. It is fundamentally concerned with the re-animation of familiar objects, landscape, pattern and a sense of place. He was Professor of Ceramics at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) from 2011–2018. Scott received his Bachelors of Art Education and Design at Saint Martin’s College and Ph.d at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design in Manchester, England.
His current research project New American Scenery has been enabled by an Alturas Foundation artist award, Ferrin Contemporary, and funding from Arts Council England. More on New American Scenery, here.
Paul Scott is represented by Ferrin Contemporary in the USA and The Scottish Gallery in Scotland.
Paul Scott, a material-based conceptual artist, creates ceramic work that blurs the boundaries between art, craft, and design. With a penchant for rescuing cast-offs, he
Recycling
1Paul Scott’s art features as an exception in today’s artistic landscape where art is often commodified, as Jeff Koon’s or Damien Hirst’s works are1 and where British artists such as Antony Gormley tend to produce monumental works, as is the case with, for instance, “Another Place”, in Crosby Bay. Paul Scott, on the contrary, makes small objects: blue and white teacups, plates and dishes in glazed ceramic.
2Little known in France, Paul Scott, a British ceramist based in the Lake district, has begun to make a name for himself in Britain and other countries such as Canada, Denmark or Norway, where several exhibitions of his artworks have been organised since the early 1990s. Like most of his contemporaries, he is a very self-conscious artist who comments abundantly on his own work on his website and in conferences, and he also publishes books on ceramics,2 which leaves little room for critics.3 However, because his small objects have the power to move the viewer, they deserve to be commented upon. Using some of Scott’s own commentaries and putting them at a distance, I will try to understand why his work is so moving. I first mean to investigate Paul Scott’s unique dialogue with artists and practices of the past and the present, and to show how the ceramist engages with current environmental, social and political issues. I will then argue that by choosing to design tableware, Paul Scott places his art at the centre of a network connecting human beings and other living beings, devising a way-of-being-with-the-world, a way of inhabiting it and an art of living where ethical, environmental, political and aesthetic concerns come together.
3As the title of the 2015-2016 installation in Stoke-on-Trent suggests, “Confected, Borrowed and Blue…”,4 Scott’s art is, first and foremost, based on borrowing. He borrows his technique, his material and his pattern(s) from others. As far as his technique is concerned, Scott works with clay, “the most ancient of cra
Paul Scott is a Cumbrian based Paul Scott is a Cumbrian based artist with a diverse practice and an international reputation. He is well known for his research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue and white artworks in glazed ceramic. These can be found in public collections around the globe – including the Victoria and Albert Museum London, The National Museum Stockholm Sweden, The National Decorative Arts Museum Norway and The Museum of Art and Design New York.
The combination of rigorous research, writing, studio practice and commissioning ensures that his work is continually developing – but it is fundamentally concerned with landscape, pattern and a sense of place.
In July 2011 Paul was appointed Professor 2 at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in Norway.
Paul Scott lives in Cumbria, North West England, in the type of rural area, which often attracts craft potters. Scott however, has gained international prominence in promoting a practice at odds with the traditional truth to materials and form/function concerns of craft potters, and indeed, of many studio ceramists. A leading proponent of ceramics and print, he has been instrumental in demonstrating the contemporary creative potential of a combination used in industry for hundreds of years to mass-produce decorative wares and tiles. The industrial associations of printed ceramics, the absence of direct traces of the maker’s hand and the apparent lack of integrity in mechanically produced imagery, has not recommended this approach to ceramics purists. A decade ago finding print in a piece of studio ceramics would have been unusual, but it is now becoming a relatively common occurrence, not least because of Scott’s pioneering example.
One of the works in Landscape : Islands is:
Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) Arctic Scenery, Kulluk. Inglaze print collage and gold lustre on feather edged pearlware platter, c.1820. Paul Scott 2014.
The work commemorates the grounding o
2022
Tea Stories, Jaggedart London, with Peter Abrahams, Charlotte Hodes, Katie Mawson, Livia Marin.
2020
Invited artist, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Piccadilly, London.
2019
Ruskin’s Manchester: ‘Devil’s Darkness’ to Beacon City, MMU Special Collections, Manchester.
FOOD: Bigger than the Plate, V&A Museum, London.
A Tea Journey: From the mountains to the table, Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park.
2018
Home Treasures, Blaafarveværket, Modum Norway
Revive, Remix, Respond, The Frick, Pittsburgh, USA
Plates Please Taste, Contemporary Craft, Geneva
2017
Alice in Wonderland, Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA
Taste Contemporary at Tresor Contemporary Craft, Basel, Switzerland
Re-invented, Clay Art Center, Port Chester, NY
Angie Lewin: A Printmaker’s Journey, Discovery Centre, Winchester, UK
Ferrin Contemporary at the New York Glass & Ceramics Fair, New York, NY
2016
True Blue, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim,Norway
Renewed Past, CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands
Unconventional Clay: Engaged in Change, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
Mending Revealed, Allsop Gallery, Bridport
Landscape : Islands, Ceramic House, Brighton
The Art of Inventive Repair, Ferrin Contemporary at New York Ceramics and Glass Fair, New York and Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA
2015
Blue and White, British Printed Ceramics, V&A Museum, London
Modern History, Contemporary Visual Arts Network, Bury Museum and Art GalleryMade in China, Ferrin Contemporary at the New York Ceramics Fair, New York
Immersion, Becoming You,Waterfall Mansion, New York City
Ink_d Gallery at the London Contemporary Art FairBevere Gallery, Worcester
2014
The Best is Not too Good for You,Contemporary Art Society/Whitechapel Gallery, London
Rugby Art Gallery and Museum A Place at the Table, Pallant House Art Gallery
Made in China, Ferrin Contemporary at Art Miami, Miam