PAUL SCOTT in: Absence Takes Form: The 2026 NCECA Annual

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

ABSENCE TAKES FORM: The 2026 NCECA ANNUAL

Curated By Adrienne Spinozzi.

NCECA Annual blends impactful attributes of invitational and open-juried models of exhibition development. Exhibition curator Adrienne Spinozzi’s curatorial vision is illuminated through the work of five invited artists. Additional works and artists will be selected through an open call for submissions. Spinozzi writes:

“Absence Takes Form explores how artists express their individual diasporic journeys in clay, taking its inspiration from Detroit, a place with a rich history shaped by the Great Migration. All diaspora and migrations are complex negotiations between gain and loss, defined by displacement, memory, and promise. These formative life experiences can offer fertile inspiration to artists, and the works in this exhibition give voice and physical space to ancestral memories by turning absence into a three-dimensional form. This reparative work is expressed in myriad ways, including acknowledging a life lived, embracing visual signifiers of one’s identity, honoring and preserving cultural techniques and traditions, and engaging in a conceptual practice that reconstructs the past anew. In this exhibition, artists engage in the act of processing their memory of an ancestral homeland through creation. Absence takes form.”

INVITED ARTISTS

Adebunmi Gbadebo
David R. MacDonald
Anina Major
Ibrahim Said
Yeesookyung

JURIED ARTISTS

Ivan Albreht, Natalia Arbelaez, Lisa Marie Barber, Malene Djenaba Barnett, Ron Baron, Yael Braha, Pattie Chalmers, Jonathan Christensen Caballero, Kaneez Zehra Hassan, Hongmi Kim Hoog, Quinn Alexandria Hunter, Roxanne Jackson, Tim Keenan, Wansoo Kim, Robert King, Josephine Larsen, Jae Won Lee, Kimberly LaVonne, Mahalexmi Mohan, Steven Montgomery, Janet Neuwalder, Joy Okokon, Ross Junior Owusu, Kyungmin Park, Yana Payusova, Tia Santana, Paul Scott, Stephanie Shih, Ellie Stanislav, Silvia Tagusagawa, Hirotsune Tashima, Iren Tete, Kwok-Pong (Bobby) Tso, Karina Yanes, Ari Zuaro

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Adrienne Spinozzi is an Associate Curator in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the American redware, stoneware, and art pottery collections. Her recent projects include Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection (2021), an exhibition of 20th- and 21st-century abstract and nonrepresentational ceramics, and Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina (2022-24), an exhibition on the contributions of the enslaved potters—both known and unknown—in western South Carolina during the 19th century. She is currently working on a reinstallation of American ceramics that will span the late 19th century through today.

FEATURED ARTWORK

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.