Remembered Space: Studio Works by Celia Scott

About

Having trained and worked as an architect, and then as an artist, it is perhaps unsurprising that Scott’s practice hovers on the boundary between architecture and fine art. Her work harks back to the utopian period of British art of the 1930s, via Constructionism (Britain 1950s), and Scott’s own formative period as an architect in the 1960s and 1970s. Oscillating between modern commitment and post-modern detachment, between Concrete Art and representation, Scott’s art is where the real meets abstraction.

All the works in this show derive from lived or worked-in places, and constitute a blend of Scott’s exploration of memory and of architectural form; for example, House Reimagined (2018) recalls the plan of the house in which Scott grew up, but with relative sizes that speak more of memory than of reality. Another fusion of interests emerges from a fascination with both materials in general, and with International Modernism; the materials used in the show (plywood, aluminium, spray paint) are redolent of early modern architecture. These materials, along with a variety of processes (drawing, painting, spraying, sanding, carving), are deployed by Scott adeptly to create perceptual ambiguities that achieve a language of forms suggesting missing links for the viewer’s eye to complete. The memories are Scott’s, but she employs their representation to trigger those of the viewer.

Works that illustrate the power of this language of forms, and its ability to engage the viewer, include Tabula Rasa I and II (both 2018), where two tables are juxtaposed in a way that creates a perceptual play with space, drawing one into the painting; the plywood ground could itself be a tabletop, asserting the objecthood of the work. The Object-Space series, like its earlier Object-Place counterpart, pushes the image further toward abstraction, and asserts the significance of the plywood, and of the pieces as objects. Newman’s Dilemma I and II (both 2018) follow Scott’s Windows series, inspired by her coming across Matisse’s radical painting French Window at Collioure (1914), and engage the viewer not only perceptually, but physically, as the vertical bars are movable objects that enable us to create our own compositions. The Threshold series takes us with Scott into the realm of the impossible, giving “promise of a world which I know cannot exist”; the real is abstracted to the point of being unreal.