NAS | RECENTLY ON VIEW
ON VIEW | 2022 & 2023
NAS | FEATURES & EVENTS
FOR MORE
View Paul Scott’s Series Statements on his Artist Profile
Paul Scott, artist portrait. Photo by Caroline Robinson, photographer, Lakeland Arts.
Ceramics Now
“The magician’s trick”
September/October 2022
Article by Ellen Bell
Ellen Bell reviews Paul Scott’s latest exhibition, a new collection of blue and white transferware that feture hard-hitting political messages on American history
“A mastercalss in blue and white transferware, Scott’s new collection is also a bravura performance in sleight of hand….For things are not as they seem…“
The Guardian
“Traditional china serving up the big issues of today in pictures“
Article by Kathryn Bromwich
Blue and white transferware plates were hugely popular in the 19th century for their bucolic pastoral scenes. Over the past 30 years, artist Paul Scott, who lives in Cumbria, has updated the medium to address some very modern issues: the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, tensions in the Middle East.
LECTURE | “Cumbrian Blue(s): New American Scenery, Transferwares for the 21st Century”
Past Event | Sunday, November 16, 5:00 pm
Paul Scott, ceramics artist, will give a Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture to the College of Art & Design on Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 5:00 p.m. in 103 Design Building Auditorium.
Cumbrian Blue(s), Indian Point cup plate, 4/50. Transferware print on pearlware cup plate, 104mm. dia. Collaborative work with Paul Holdway (former head of engraving at Spode). Tissue print transfer taken from a copper plate engraved by Paul Holdway, Paul Scott 2021.
NAS | GUIDE
New American Scenery
In New American Scenery, Scott scrutinizes the American landscape from a contemporary perspective, one that grapples with issues of globalization, energy generation and consumption, capitalism, social justice, immigration, and the human impact on the environment. The images that Scott creates for his ceramics depict unsettling views of nuclear power plants, aging urban centers, abandoned industrial sites, wildfires, and isolating walls. As representations of the American landscape, they suggest a subversion of the picturesque aesthetic—the unpicturesque picturesque—and a new, disturbing norm.
“NAS” includes the following bodies of work, many of which were conceived on location and/or with insights from significant collaborators. Each highlighted title below represents a sub-series containing multiple iterations and/or designs.
FOR MORE
View Paul Scott’s Series Statements on his Artist Profile
NEW AMERICAN SCENERY IN THE US
Visit these museums in the US that have recently acquired work
from Scott’s American Scenery series.
Crocker Art Museum
Birmingham Museum of Art
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
RISD Museum
Boston MFA
Brooklyn Museum
Newark Museum
Carnegie Museum of Art
Mount Holyoke Art Museum
Chipstone Foundation
IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
ADDITIONAL US COLLECTIONS
Alturas Foundation, San Antonio, TX
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, WI
Copeland Borough Council Collection, Oregon College of Art and Craft Collection, Portland, OR
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Denison University, Granville, OH
Kohler Company, Kohler, WI
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA
New York Historical Society, New York, NY
Newark Art Museum, Newark, NJ
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA
RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
NAS | AT MUSEUMS
ALSO ON VIEW | 2022 & 2023
Paul Scott transforms factory-made tableware with subversive imagery and commentary. He replicates traditional porcelain designs developed by late 18th-century English artisans, such as the Willow pattern or Spode’s Blue Italian. These early ornamentations included appropriated motifs copied from hand-painted blue and white wares imported from China, and were mass-produced using printed glaze transfers applied on porcelain and pearlware blanks.
At first glance, Scott’s contemporary redesigns are indistinguishable from manufactured originals. This intentional mimicking is the result of years of studio practice and academic research into the lost history of British and European transferware. The resulting objects seamlessly blend modern and conceptual imagery, posing compelling observations on current issues such as environmental destruction, racism, gentrification, and social injustice.
The series New American Scenery is the result of a multi-year grant from the Alturas Foundation that enabled Scott to travel and conduct research throughout the United States. He studied transferware in museum collections and visited many of the sites illustrated on their surfaces. The historic originals were not made in America. The objects were supplied by British companies that plied the burgeoning post-Revolution market with decorative and luxury goods. In the early 1800s, factory owners and agents traveled to the New Republic, meeting with merchants and taking orders for British-made ceramics. Local artists were often commissioned to sketch subject matter, including idyllic landscapes, dignitaries, landmarks, and historical sites, which, as engravings, would be used to decorate tableware earmarked for export. These highly prized English objects, initially marketed to an expanding upper class, were available in varying consumer levels. Popular mass-produced designs were sold to an ever-growing merchant and middle class who had the funds to afford decorative objects, while wealthier households commissioned their own patterns, often printed on finer bone china or porcelain
In this exhibition, Scott’s artworks are paired with objects from the LSU Museum of Art’s permanent collection to provoke further contemplation on the issues presented by the artist.
NAS | PAST
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
This exhibition features the artwork of British artist Paul Scott, paired with transferwares, prints and paintings from the Albany Institute’s collection. Together, they enact a dialogue between present and past—between Scott’s observations of America today and the constructed ideals and romanticized views consumed by Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For the past five years, Scott has examined, reworked, and reinterpreted the transfer-printed ceramics that English potteries produced by the thousands throughout the nineteenth century. These earthenware plates, platters, and pitchers, printed in shades of blue, red, purple, and black, graced many American dining tables and presented images of picturesque scenery and stately public buildings. In his series, New American Scenery, Scott scrutinizes the American landscape from a contemporary perspective, one that grapples with issues of globalization, energy generation and consumption, capitalism, social justice, and immigration, as well as the human impact on the environment. The images that Scott creates for his ceramics depict unsettling views of nuclear power plants, aging urban centers, abandoned industrial sites, wildfires, and isolating walls. As representations of the American landscape, they suggest a subversion of the picturesque aesthetic—the unpicturesque picturesque—and a new, disturbing norm.
LECTURE | PAUL SCOTT: NEW AMERICAN SCENERY
Sunday, November 6, 2:00 to 3:00pm
In this lecture, Paul Scott will discuss his artistic process and provide exclusive insights into Paul Scott, New American Scenery.
Included with gallery admission at Albany Institute of History & Art
NAS | PAST
New American Scenery printed ceramics by Paul Scott
NAS | PAST
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
This installation juxtaposes early 19th-century Staffordshire ceramic transferwares drawn from the shelves of the RISD Museum storage with new Cumbrian Blue(s) artworks. Replacing the porcelain works typically on view in the Lucy Truman Aldrich gallery, New American Scenery melds historic printed tablewares, altered antique ceramics, and reclaimed Syracuse China plates with new screenprints to update early transferware subjects for the 21st century.
In the early nineteenth century, imported Staffordshire blue-and-white printed transferwares formed part of the new media of their age. Collected at the beginning of the twentieth century as iconic depictions of the early, independent United States, many were later donated to public art museums inspiring a new wave of pictorial wares.
Over the last five years, Paul Scott has been investigating these transferwares as well as the contemporary landscape of the United States. An ongoing dialogue between documentary, historical, travel and artistic research has led to the creation of a new substantive body of artwork, New American Scenery.
In it, Scott references archives, objects, the motives, and thinking of original collectors as well as the post-industrial landscapes of twenty-first-century America. The new work deals with issues surrounding globalization, energy generation and consumption, capitalism and immigration, and other legacies of history. The artwork includes antique tablewares re-worked by selective erasure, re-glazing, and the addition of newly printed decals. Others involve the re-use of cut, broken fragments using collage and traditional restoration processes, as well as prints and other works on paper.
– RISD installation photography by Erik Gould. All other photography by John Polak.
NAS | PAST
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
New American Scenery showcases the latest ceramic works by the contemporary Cumbrian artist Paul Scott, featuring works of historical transferwares that have been updated for today’s audience.
Scott spent five years investigating early blue and white transferwares that were shipped from Staffordshire to the United States in the 19th century. He works with familiar blue and white ceramics, which were available cheaply so more commonly used than collected, to tell modern stories based on his trips around America. He reworks antique wares, erasing, adding and recreating new patterns by reusing cut and broken fragments or adding newly printed decals.
The exhibition will allow visitors to see the contrasts between the old and new shapes and forms and think about decoration and what it means.
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