Angels and Sunflowers - The Art of Sally Scott : A Retrospective

About

The artist Sally Scott is one of Britain’s foremost artists in glass, her distinctive, large-scale works (many featuring angels) illuminate over 50 sites around Britain, including Westminster Abbey, Leeds Minster, Leicester Cathedral and the headquarters of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

A retrospective exhibition celebrating over six decades of the art of Sally Scott will be held at the Menier Gallery in Southwark, London SE1 from January 23rd to February 2nd 2019, and will feature her work as a glass engraver, painter and printmaker. Sally studied painting at the Royal Academy Schools.  

In addition to the celebrated glass work, Sally is also known as a painter and printmaker, and as a young artist worked on films including ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ featuring Meryl Streep and the iconic 1960s film ‘The Bliss of Mrs Blossom’ with Shirley MacLaine.

In the 1970s Sally began to experiment with innovative techniques of sandblasting and painting on metal, this led her into the glass work. Some of these pivotal works are in the show.

She has made work for St. Mary’s Church Battersea, which has strong links to William Blake and J M W Turner, two artists who have inspired Scott; while her striking sunflower image for a door in Norwich Cathedral is based on the work of T.S. Eliot. Sally’s glass engravings can be seen at Oxford, Cambridge, Sheffield and Lancaster universities, and a work at Headington Quarry church in Oxford celebrates the Narnia chronicles of C.S. Lewis.

She has also made work for the Catholic shrine Church at Walsingham and for hotels in London, Copenhagen, Zaire and Stockholm. Her work has been the subject of questions on the tv quiz shows Mastermind and The Chase.

In this landmark exhibition, the upstairs gallery of the Menier will focus on Sally's architectural glass, including 5 Cathedrals; Ripon, Leicester, St Albans, Llandaff, Norwich and the west doors of Westminster Abbey, much of which was created in partnership with renowned glass engraver David Peace. The 'Jacob's Ladder' screen she produced for Leeds Minster in 1989 is 9 metres high, and at the time was the biggest piece of engraved glass commissioned in the UK since Coventry Cathedral in 1960s. Here the work will be displayed through film, full scale drawings, photographs and samples. Sally is a fellow of the Guild of Glass Engravers. A new book about Sally’s glass work will be launched during the exhibition, book launch Saturday 26th January at 2pm.

The downstairs gallery will showcase her work for films from the 1960s to the 1980s, also on show is some of Sally's prolific output of oil paintings, pastels and prints; some items are for sale.

Sally Scott is available for interview and photos of all the work are available on request.