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Five Times More

​An exhibition of artworks by Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize 2021 Highly Commended Artist

Margaret Scott

Curated by Katie Lynch
​
On display at the Ashurst Emerging Artist Gallery, 10th January - 30th March 2022
Maggie Scott’s practice is informed by the experience of being black, British and a woman. With Five Times More she depicts the intimate relationship between mother and child, reflecting on both personal and collective experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

Scott’s technical practice is unparalleled in the landscape of contemporary British art, sitting at the boundary of tapestry and digital media, she employs a combination of photography, digital collage and silk and then injects colour by laboriously pushing vibrant merino wool fibres through silk in a process known as nuno felting. The intensely physical process of felting is followed by the careful process of using stich to emphasise the smaller details of an image, evoking both the physicality of childbirth and the careful attention and tenderness of what follows. In working with fibre Scott pushes a medium traditionally associated with craft into the realm of fine art. As a textile artist Scott employs distinctly feminine materials, but with soft images she speaks hard truths. 
​

Birth is the most innate experience of human existence yet for centuries childbirth has also been the most dangerous undertaking of a woman’s life.Rates of maternal mortality have dropped dramatically in Britain since the mid 18th century.  However, the effects of modern medicine have not been felt equally. In 2019 MBRACE UK published data within its Perinatal Mortality report which revealed that people of colour remain at a much higher risk during pregnancy and childbirth within the British healthcare system. Most disturbingly the report revealed that in the United Kingdom a black woman is five times more likely to die during childbirth than her white counterpart.

Five Times More humanises the statistics published by MBRACE UK, illustrating abstract numbers with the faces of young healthy women. Tender works position the viewer as a voyeur observing a private moment between mother and child; in some works a mother to be contemplates her swollen belly while in others she embraces her young child. The works can be read as a celebration of the bond between mother and child, yet they are shrouded in ambiguity, whether the fate of the subjects is real or imagined is unknown. Five Times and its sister work, Sleeping Beauties address this ambiguity most explicitly as the viewer is forced to contemplate the death of the women portrayed in the latter. 

Five Times More is an ongoing project which has been adjusted for the purpose of exhibition at Ashurst London, view the complete body of work at maggiescottart.com. 

Curated by Maggie Scott and Katie Lynch.


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One Hundred and Twenty-One 
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
110cm x 175cm
2021

One Hundred and Twenty-One is a portrait of a young mother cradling her newborn. Traces of exhaustion often found in the faces of new parents can be detected in her gentle smile, yet the viewer is struck by the tenderness of the portrait which speaks to the profound bond between mother and child. While the image itself is heart-warming, the title of this work alludes to tragedy. MBRACE UK’s 2019 study on Perinatal Mortality revealed that black babies have a 50% increased risk of neonatal death, and a 121% increased risk of stillbirth compared to their white counterparts. This figure imbues the portrait with ambiguity, the expression of the young mother becomes harder to read; is it relief, or heartbreak, or even imagined? The work exemplifies Maggie Scott’s tendency to draw her viewers in with nostalgic images only to deliver hard truths.
Picture
 Five Times  
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
119cm x 166cm
2021
Picture
Sleeping Beauties
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
120cm x 175cm
2021

Picture
Five Times More
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
120cm x 170cm
2021


A pregnant woman cradles her swollen belly in the title piece of Maggie Scott’s most recent series. The subject stands with her hands on either side of her belly in a familiar gesture; at once protective and filled with love. Her identity is obscured allowing audience members to see a version of themselves reflected in the portrait. The image itself promises joy in the prospect of a newborn, however the title alludes to the significant inequality British women of colour face during pregnancy and childbirth. The work humanises the statistics published in MBRACE UK’s 2019 Perinatal Mortality report, positioning her audience to see themselves or those they love in the image and therefore consider how the reality of markedly riskier pregnancies affects black women and their families. 
Picture
Union Jack 
Direct Print on Aluminium Dibond with Floater Frame
Image size: 80 x 106.6 cm 
Outer size: 84.4 x 111 cm

Alu-Dibond 3 mm
Shadow gap frame (black oak)
2021

Anticipation fills the face of a young mother-to-be while around her a Union Jack shatters. Scott returns to the motif of the crumbling Union Jack throughout Five Times More, juxtaposing portraits of joyful mothers-to-be against the shattered remains of the British national flag. The motif is Scott’s most blatant reference to the failures of British healthcare policy in treating black mothers. The NHS has for many has been a source of national pride; it was the first public healthcare system of its kind in granting Britons access to free healthcare on the basis of citizenship rather than payment of fees. With the introduction of the NHS and the corresponding improvement of modern medicine came a significant drop in infant and maternal mortality. However, the effects of public healthcare have not been felt equally, demonstrating the prevailing existence of structural racism in the public health system. While her subjects eagerly anticipate motherhood, they face a healthcare system which has continued to let down women of colour.
Picture
STATS
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
170cm x 120cm
​2021

The success of the social justice movements of the 1960s drove scholars in a range of disciplines to increase efforts to understand human inequalities. Over the last sixty years researchers have created a constantly growing library of data which provides empirical evidence of inequalities between groups. Whilst such research is necessary in the pursuit of a more equitable society, it also reduces groups of people to figures on a page, all but removing the people they represent. With STATS Maggie Scott has depicted the ghost-like silhouettes of two women whose faces have been drained of colour and are mostly obscured by large and ostensibly meaningless numbers. STATs sits within a body of work that seeks to illustrate the abstract numbers of the MRBACE UK Perinatal Mortality report with the faces of healthy young women, addressing the need to humanise people who are the subject of such reports explicitly.
Picture
Touch // 1
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021
Picture
Touch // 2
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021
Picture
Touch // 3
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021
Picture
Face It // 1
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021


Picture
Face It // 2
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021
Picture
Face It // 3
Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
114cm x 80cm
2021

About the Artist

Maggie Scott creates art from the particularity of who she is: a black woman, a feminist, a daughter, a mother, an activist and a British textile artist.
Born in London, Scott graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1976 with BA honours in Fashion Textiles and set up her first studio in London in 1980. Maggie became well-known for her sumptuously crafted felt textiles to wear. Her life as a textile artist had existed in parallel with her involvement in gender and race politics, but it was an experiment with a series of large, autobiographical textile pieces which allowed her to combine art an activism. Her first body of work Negotiations – black in a white majority culture led to a bursary award and a solo show at Leicester Museum in 2012 and ultimately her transition from the world of fashion to the world of fine art. 

Scott’s large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the laborious process of felting, digitally manipulated portraits are printed onto silk chiffon then hand felted and stitched. Her reinterpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of the representation and tensions and contradictions of a black British or black European identity. 
She achieved notoriety in 2013 for Zwarte Piet, a body of work exploring the eponymous Dutch phenomenon of ‘blacking up’. Using self-portraiture, she referenced the quaint and offensive Dutch ‘character’ by creating an alter ego for Piet, inviting the viewer to re evaluate Zwarte Piet, no longer the slave or child-like fool, but a commanding adult female presence with a very different agenda.
Scott’s significant body of portraits continue the exploration of conflicting narratives first undertaken in Negotiations; the softness and flexibility of the textures contrasting with the often-uncompromising expression.
Scott is currently working on two projects: Five Times More, a visual response to the recent UK government report on British Black and Asian British pregnancy outcomes and Fast Fashion and Climate Justice’: The Global North’s Addiction to Cheap Clothing and Landfill in the Global South. Both projects include her trademark large, felted photomontages along with installations and limited-edition prints.

Scott’s works have been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, China and Canada.
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Head on over to her website:
https://maggiescottonline.com

And make sure to give her a follow:

About the Curator

Katie Lynch is an Australian-British art advisor and curator who specialises in career development for emerging artists. 

After starting her career at Sotheby’s Australia Katie moved from the secondary to the primary market founding Studio Art Advisory, a creative agency mentoring, supporting, and representing rising artists from across the world. Katie leads Studio Art from a remote town in Central Australia where she also manages the Artists of the Barkly collective, a group of Aboriginal artists working the remote Barkly region of outback Australia. Within her capacity as manager of the Artists of the Barkly collective Katie facilitates the career development of over forty artists working from studios across four remote communities. 

Katie holds a BA in Art History and a MA in Art Business, her research specialities are Indigenous Australian art and funding for public arts.




www.studioartadvisory.com
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  • Home
  • Exhibitions
    • Five Times More - Margaret Scott
    • Hold Me Closer - Thomas Hjelm
    • Perpetual - Sueyon Yang
    • Disembody - Thiago Sancho
    • Liminal Spaces - Maryam Hina Hasnain
    • AEAP2021 Winners >
      • Spiritus Mundi - Charles Inge
      • Moving:Still - Alexandra Harley
      • Topographies of Fragility - Ingrid Weyland
      • Tartarus - Grete Hjorth-Johansen
    • AEAP2021 Shortlist
    • The Rio Series - Caio Locke
    • Meridian Skylines - Caio Locke
  • Contact
  • Purchase Artwork