American Scenery and Souvenirs: Transferware by Paul Scott

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In American Scenery and Souvenirs British artist Paul Scott reanimates historical transferware to create new works depicting scenes from contemporary American life. 

In the nineteenth century, blue-and-white printed transferware plates portraying images of American scenery, cities, and their significant landmarks were mass-produced by potteries in Staffordshire, England for export to the US. By the turn of the twentieth century these works became tremendously popular collectibles, cherished by the American middle class as souvenirs of travel and experience. 

Paul Scott’s current work combines the visual vocabulary and processes of historical transferware with unexpected and incongruous vignettes of life in America today, engaging with themes of globalization, energy consumption, capitalism, social justice, immigration, and the environmental impact of human activity. In American Scenery and Souvenirs, nuclear power plants, decaying urban centers, abandoned industrial sites, wildfires, and border walls intrude amidst the traditionally bucolic landscape. These provocative scenes subvert the picturesque aesthetic traditionally associated with American transferware, challenging the viewer to reconsider the nation’s environmental and social realities. The exhibition presents Scott’s work in dialogue with vintage Rowland & Marsellus transferware from the Lightner Museum collection to showcase Scott’s technical and poignant interventions.

American Scenery and Souvenirs: Transferware by Paul Scott is presented at the Lightner Museum by the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida. Additional support comes from the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council and the St. Johns Cultural Council.

VIEW THE PRESS RELEASE

Newly Produced Works for the Exhibition

“[I] use print trays to house select edited remnants of our industrial past. Transferware, Staffordshire’s great gift to the world, melded the technology of the paper printer with vitreous melted cobalt blues to create mystical, exotic images on a domestic affordable scale. I harvest details from old, cracked and broken tablewares and give them new lives and meanings in collages that meld historical detail with contemporary fragments of my own printed ceramics. The tray is also a remnant, a memory of the print media revolution which helped facilitate the industrial age and enable the democratization of imagery.”

• Paul Scott
  

Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Souvenirs, Collage No:1.
2025
Transferware collage, Rowland Marsellus and Adams early 20th century souvenir plates, in altered, repurposed print tray made in America
23 x 16 x 2″.
Paul Scott 2025.

‘The amount of land scorched by wildfires in California has been on the rise for decades, and human-caused climate change is almost entirely to blame.

A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that California’s summertime burned area has increased fivefold since 1971….  and could grow by another 50 percent by 2050. More he study finds that rising temperatures and declining precipitation, fuelled by human emissions of greenhouse gases, are the primary culprit. Increasingly arid conditions have provided a surplus of dry fuel for fires to consume, causing bigger and more intense blazes as time goes on. Natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate, on the other hand, have had little to no influence on California’s worsening fire season. The study makes it clear that human activity is at fault.’ – Chelsea Harvey, Scientific American, (June 14, 2023)…..

The California Wildfires, Los Angeles collage plate was produced in response to the devastating events of early 2025.

Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, California Wildfires,  LA Series No:1.
2025
Transferware collage on altered Rowland Marsellus Souvenir plate c.1900
10 x 10 x 1″.
Paul Scott 2025.

ABOUT PAUL SCOTT

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.