PAUL SCOTT

HIGHLIGHTED ARTWORKS


New American Scenery Series

Paul Scott has produced multiple series, including his recently touring New American Scenery Series, in which many of the developing bodies of work are included.

Please check back regularly as we are correlating the artist’s statements with developing displays and informational pdfs.

As always, please inquire or contact us for more details or lists of available artworks.

Views of New York


Paul Scott, "Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, View of Albany, New York, No. 2", 2019, transfer print collage on salvaged Syracuse China with pearlware glaze, 11 x 11 x 1".

Energy & Environment


Paul Scott, "Cumbrian Blue(s), Indian Point cup plate, 4/50", 2021, transferware print on pearlware cup plate, 4.25 x 4.25 x .5". 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.

PAUL SCOTT


ABOUT


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.

Paul Scott is represented by Ferrin Contemporary in the USA and The Scottish Gallery in Scotland.

ON HIS WORK


Paul Scott, "Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Sampler Jug, No. 7 (After Stubbs)", 2021, transfer print collage on pearlware jug, 15 x 14 x 11.75". transfer print collage on pearlware jug designed by Paul Scott and Ed Bentley. Model made by Ed Bentley, fabricated by "Ceramics by Design", Longton, Stoke on Trent, England The inside, ‘Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Sampler Jug No:7, (After Stubbs)'. Decal collage on pearlware jug, 390mm x 350mm x 50mm. Paul Scott 2021 transferware; blue & white; pearlware; Cumbrian Blue(s); sampler; Stubbs; Black Lives Matter Protests; Police riot; New American Scenery; collage; decal; pearlware; Paul Scott; Joseph Stubbs; Detroit Ghost gardens; Angola 3: Pipelines and Peltier; Standing Rock; Belle Island; Cape Coast Castle; Portland; Selma; Uranium

Paul Scott, "Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Broken Treaties, Standing Rock, After Ryan Vizzions, with Mega Mae Plenty Chief, Lakota Oyate on horseback, No. 3", 2022, transfer print collage on Wm Penn's Treaty transferware plate by Thomas Goodwin c.1835, 10.5 x 10.5 x 1.25". Red, blue, and white transferware plate, with updated decal imagery of Standing Rock, ND. The imagery is of Mega Mae Plenty Chief, a Lakota Oyate on horseback, posed in front of the police and military present and opposing. They are the single figure if front of the entire army presence, signifying the resistance to drilling for oil in the US on Native American Lands. Subject matter for the artwork includes the following artist series: New American Scenery, Native American, Antique, Energy, Environment, Race, Indigeneity

Paul Scott, a material-based conceptual artist, creates ceramic work that blurs the boundaries between art, craft, and design. With a penchant for rescuing cast-offs, he restores them to a new life by using them as a canvas for biting social commentary. His work tells stories that explore the unexpected movement of images through materials, media, cultures, politics, histories, and geographies, inviting us to see these objects in a new way.

Scott is an authority on printed vitreous surfaces. His research, artwork, and book, Ceramics in Print, has been instrumental in the phenomenal growth of printmaking techniques in contemporary ceramics.

Scott’s latest book, Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, co-edited with Knut Astrup Bull, explores the complex journey of ideas and images to their realization in blue and white, then multicoloured tablewares. Blending historical enquiry with contemporary practice, the book illustrates how artists re-appropriate this historical genre. Text and visual essays explore unexpected political and cultural themes, changing the way we view these familiar objects.

In the fall of 2013, Scott, a resident of the UK, traveled in the US, visiting museum collections of transferware and participating in artist residencies at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia and Project Art in Massachusetts. His series, New American Scenery, presents a striking duality with current American imagery applied to antique china pieces that brings the past forward, exposes us to how we have shaped our landscape, and hints at what the future may hold.

Scott embarked on a new body of work in 2014 that involves the physical collaging of antique fragments using traditional ceramic conservation methods to join the elements. The mending, melding, and juxtaposition of the separate components creates completely new work, proving, again, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Scott’s work can be found in public and private collections around the globe.

Ferrin Contemporary represents Scott in the US. His work can be viewed online at FerrinContemporary.com, at Project Art in Cummington, MA, and at various venues in the US.

NEW AMERICAN SCENERY


NAS | GUIDE

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 title below represents a sub-series containing multiple iterations and/or designs: American Cities & Landscapes, Broken Treaties, Energy & Environment, Posy Vases, Race, Indigeneity & Immigration, Samplers, Sampler Jugs, Souvenirs, Views of New York.

Click the Artworks Tab on the left to learn more about each series.

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

SELECT SERIES STATEMENTS

“New American Scenery, Visitors to America”

The visitor, the stranger, the foreigner in a new land, encountering things that are both very familiar and yet disorienting….

I follow a tradition, a long line of visitors to America who’ve written about and depicted thecountry.

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“New American Scenery, the Background….”

Transferware:

In the late 18th century, blue and white Staffordshire transferwares were developed to imitate painted Chinese export porcelains. By the early 19th century printed patterns had expanded to include images of the Grand Tour and of Empire. A particular dark blue version of the genre became popular in the United States, & from Liverpool, Staffordshire potters exported huge quantities of decorated wares depicting American subjects & landscape. Later that century these were to become highly collectible. … “.

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“New American Scenery, Cape Coast Castle….”

This has a direct link to toppled Bristol statue of slave trader Edward Colston of the Royal African Company (1680 – 1692)… Its administration centre was Cape Coast Castle in current day Ghana. Commenting on the UK’s Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death on BBC Newsnight, Aliyah Hasinah explained how the UK has ‘had a longer time to marinate racism, to deeply entrench it through the use of scientific racism, eugenics, art, culture, business, politics, policies… In the same TV programme American actor Clark Peters talked about UK racism being ‘cloaked in beautiful language’.

Characterised by a dark blue palette of extraordinary depth & subtlety blue and white transferware was part of the ‘new media’ of its day… huge quantities of pictorial Staffordshire wares were exported to the US in early 19th century.… This platter is a perfect exemplar of the cloaking of racist history in ‘beautiful’ form… The original source of Enoch Wood’s transferware design was an engraving by John Hill (1806) after a painting by George Webster (1799), commissioned by HRH the Duke of Clarence as part of a campaign against abolitionists.. This platter was from a series of marine views made exclusively for US market.… In the original images both ships and castle flags were British, but Woods’ ‘slaver’ sails under Stars & Stripes.

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CURRENT + RECENT EXHIBITIONS


PAUL SCOTT in Hudson River Valley: Echoes

Group Exhibition at Gamble Family Gallery | Dunedin Fine Art Center, Dunedin, FL

featuring work by Paul Scott

September 14 – December 23, 2024

Group exhibition of artists and experiences encountered in Dunedin’s October 2022 travels to the Hudson River Valley hosted by DFAC’s beloved auxiliary, the Sterling Society.

50 Years in the Making: Alumni Exhibition at The Clay Studio

Group Exhibition at The Clay Studio | Philadelphia, PA

featuring work by Paul Scott, Sergei Isupov, and Lauren Mabry

June 13th – September 1st, 2024

This Alumni Exhibition showcases artwork to reflect the current practice of the over 150 artist who have participated in The Clay Studio’s Resident Artist Program, Guest Artist Program, and Associate Artist Program over the 50 years since its founding.

CONFECTED, BORROWED & BLUE, AN AMERICAN SAMPLER: TRANSFERWARE BY PAUL SCOTT 

Solo Exhibition at the Shelburne Museum | Shelburne, VT

May 11 through October 20, 2024

The first in a series of “interventions” by contemporary artists features works by British artist Paul Scott, known for his provocative reinterpretation of 19th-century transferware. Plates, platters, and jugs by Scott will be displayed alongside objects from the Museum’s collection creating “segues” that spark dialogue between the old and new.

PAUL SCOTT at the Albany International Airport Gallery

Solo Exhibition | Albany Airport, Terminal A | Albany, NY

May 16 through December 31, 2024 

This installation includes a selection of Paul Scott’s transferware plates in Albany Airport’s Terminal A. Travelers are invited to view Paul’s scenes of New York on their walk from Security to the terminal.

Paul Scott, "Picturesque Views, Newburg, Hudson River", Installation at Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, February 2 – September 1, 2024

RIVERS FLOW/ARTISTS CONNECT


Group Exhibition | Hudson River Museum | Yonkers, NY

February 2 – September 1, 2024

In Rivers Flow / Artists Connect, American artists from the 1820s to the present day explore and illuminate our profound, symbiotic relationship with significant waterways, such as the Hudson River, the Susquehanna, and the Missouri, as well as symbolic representations.

PAUL SCOTT in Clayscapes

2024 | Group Exhibition | Everson Museum of Art | Syracuse, NY

April 13 through October 20, 2024

Clayscapes is a tribute to clay’s ubiquitous presence in our lives, and to the powerful metaphorical and spiritual role that it can play.

featuring Paul Scott, Raymon Elozua, Cristina Córdova, & Caroline Slotte

Ferrin Contemporary presents Paul Scott in "Our America/Whose America?". Installation for NCECA Richmond, 2024 at the Wickham House at The Valentine Museum, Richmond, VA. Image courtesy of The Valentine Museum.

OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?

2024 | Group Exhibition in the Wickham House at the Valentine Museum | Richmond, VA

February 20, 2024 – April 21, 2024

Our America/Whose America? Is a “call and response” exhibition between contemporary artists and historic ceramic objects.

Pearlware, Polish, and Privilege: Artwork by Paul Scott

2022-2023 | Solo Exhibition at  LSU Museum of Art | Baton Rouge, LA

Pearlware, Polish, and Privilege: Artwork by Paul Scott  Featuring works from New American Scenery, on view October 27, 2022–February 26, 2023

View the LSU exhibition page here.

NEW AMERICAN SCENERY: The Art of Paul Scott

2022-2023 | Solo Exhibition at The Albany Institute of History & Art | Albany, NY

New American Scenery Has been exhibiting internationally since 2019.

This exhibition features the artwork of Scott, paired with transferwares, prints and paintings from the Albany Institute’s collection.

View the exhibition page here.

ALL EXHIBITIONS


CLAYSCAPES

Everson Museum of Art | Syracuse, NY
April 13 – October 20, 2024
Featuring Cristina Córdova, Paul Scott, & Steven Young Lee

VIDEOS

Video: LSU LECTURE | “Cumbrian Blue(s): New American Scenery, Transferwares for the 21st Century” 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.

LECTURE | “Cumbrian Blue(s): New American Scenery, Transferwares for the 21st Century”

Sunday, November 16, 5:00 pm

Paul Scott, ceramics artist, was invited to speak through the Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture Program at the College of Art & Design on Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 5:00 p.m. in 103 Design Building Auditorium.

LEARN MORE

WATCH THE RECORDING OF THE LECTURE

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: ILLUSTRATED CERAMICS AND AMERICAN IDENTITY

Panelists: Leslie Ferrin, Elizabeth Alexander, Jacqueline Bishop, Judy Chartrand, Niki Johnson, and Paul Scott.

Hidden in plain sight, illustrations on porcelain and ceramic ware have, throughout history, transformed functional objects into message-bearers for a wide range of political and propagandistic causes, whether exchanged by heads of state or acquired for use or display in domestic settings. Leslie Ferrin of Ferrin Contemporary will discuss the imagery, drawn from popular nineteenth-century prints, that was reproduced on widely distributed ceramics portraying historical events, indigenous people, and notable explorers, inventors, and politicians through a white European lens. The panel will explore how these seemingly ordinary objects, including Rockwell collector plates, have helped to establish firmly held beliefs about American identity. Artists Elizabeth Alexander, Jacqueline Bishop, Judy Chartrand, Niki Johnson, and Paul Scott, will discuss contemporary ceramics, which reject systems of racial oppression and invite reconsideration of the sanitized version of history that was presented for generations.

View Hidden in Plain Sight: Illustrated Ceramics and American Identity

PAUL SCOTT New American Scenery | Plate engraving with Paul Scott and Paul Holdway

October 13, 2021. Produced by The Bowes Museum. Ceramic artist Paul Scott tells us more about his collaboration with former SPODE engraver, Paul Holdway. Part of the New American Scenery Project.

View Plate engraving with Paul Scott and Paul Holdway

ARTIST TALK | MELTING POINT: RISING WATERS with Courtney M. Leonard, Paul Scott, and Norwood Viviano, moderated by Jami Powell

September 15, 2021. Ferrin Contemporary Curator Conversation featuring artists Courtney M. Leonard, Paul Scott, and Norwood Viviano. Moderated by Jami Powell, Ph.D., Curator of Indigenous Art, Hood Museum, Dartmouth University (Hanover, NH).

View Artist Talk | MELTING POINT: Rising Waters

FOUNDERS’ HOUR FEATURING Paul Scott with Leslie Ferrin & Brian Gallagher

June 11, 2021 | The Mint Museum’s Founders’ Circle is pleased to present their first ever International Founders’ Hour featuring UK-based artist, Paul Scott. From his studio in Cumbria, Scott creates contemporary versions of traditional blue and white transferware ceramics, updating this historic media for the 21st century. Scott’s work engages political and social issues that resonate with our lives today, questioning the cultural history of transferware ceramics in the dissemination of national ideas and settler-centric narratives.

View Founders’ Hour featuring Paul Scott with Leslie Ferrin & Brian Gallagher

FERRIN CONTEMPORARY IN CONVERSATION: RAID THE ICEBOX NOW with Elizabeth Williams, Beth Katleman, and Paul Scott

June 7, 2021 | For the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox exhibition, RISD Museum invited eight contemporary artists and collectives to mine the museum, taking inspiration from objects or incorporating objects into new installations that reconsider how collections can be reimagined.

View Ferrin Contemporary in Conversation: Raid the Icebox Now with Elizabeth Williams, Beth Katleman, and Paul Scott

CATALOGS


‘Raid the Ice Box Now’ Digital Catalog

  • Produced by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, 2019
  • To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its exhibition Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol, the RISD Museum is engaging contemporary artists and designers Pablo Bronstein, Nicole Eisenman, Pablo Helguera, Beth Katleman, Simone Leigh, Sebastian Ruth, Paul Scott, and Triple Canopy to create new bodies of work or create a unique curatorial project using the museum as a site for critical, creative production and presentation. Employing the galleries and digital platforms as well as spaces beyond the museum walls, these artists will question dominant narratives and highlight the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the museum’s collection, which includes more than 100,000 works spanning ancient times to the present. A landmark example of artist-curated museum exhibitions, Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol (1970) presented entire sections of objects as they appeared in storage, with little or no connoisseurial regard for their condition, authenticity, or art historical status. It remains one of the most celebrated and subversive exhibitions in contemporary art history.
  • Raid the Icebox Now is made possible by a lead grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the RISD Museum Associates, Judy and Robert Mann, Taylor Box Company, and a generous in-kind gift from Meyer Sound Laboratories.

View ‘Raid the Ice Box Now’ Digital Catalog

SELECT PRESS & ARTIST NEWS

Recent Features

ART DAILY

Renowned British artist Paul Scott on view at Shelburne Museum

Art Daily July 2024
Shelburne Museum

SHELBURNE, VT. – Shelburne Museum presents the work of renowned British artist Paul Scott in the exhibition Confected, Borrowed & Blue: Transferware by Paul Scott that includes provocative reinterpretations of 19th-century transferware from Shelburne Museum’s permanent collection along with a work commissioned for the exhibition.

VIEW ARTICLE

SEVEN DAYS

Paul Scott’s Provocative Ceramics Reinvent Transferware Traditions

Seven Days June 19, 2024
Article by Pamela Polston 

A recently opened exhibition at Shelburne Museum, titled “Confected, Borrowed & Blue,” presents a selection of the internationally known British artist’s transferware updated for modern times.

VIEW ARTICLE

Financial Times

“Politics on a plate: how ceramics became a tool for satire and protest”

Financial Times March 15, 2024
Article by

A new exhibition celebrates the ‘Trojan horse’ of the decorative arts

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Ceramics Now

“The magician’s trick”

Ceramics Now 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…

VIEW MORE/VIEW PDF.

The Guardian

Traditional china serving up the big issues of today in pictures

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.

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“On the Threshold: Paul Scott New American Scenery”

Essay by Jo Dahn

When he began to experiment with printing on ceramics Paul Scott soon found himself in liminal territory: his creative practice was becoming unclassifiable. ‘In those days’, he has said, ‘there was no-one around me who was doing anything remotely similar, but that’s a double-edged sword: it launches you into a no-man’s-land, because you’re not a painter or a fine art printmaker and you’re not a potter or a craftsperson … In a way I enjoyed it immensely because I was doing things that people hadn’t seen before.’

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 “Exhibition | ‘Home Truths,’ Paul Scott’s Brutal Blue and White Porcelain Plates”

Cfile.Capsule

Re-purposing these cultural artifacts in such a way as to offer new narrative interpretations that encourage re-examination. Drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of and fascination with the material, he alters, erases and adds new images to the intricately detailed scenes and patterns of these domestic items, whereby the imagery is ruptured and recalibrated for a contemporary world. Scott’s interventions enable him to explore a range of issues from ecology to the refugee crisis.

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“Paul Scott’s Confected Landscapes and Contemporary Vignettes”

Essay by Amy Gogarty

The work disccussed in this article relates to reasearch conducted during the course of his PhD, yet it embodies themes that have preoccupied him for some time. These include theories of picturesque landscape painting; the remediation and circulation in print form of such painting; domestic ceramic objects printed with landscape imagery and a host of contemporary issues concerning relationships between human civilization and the natural world.

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ARTIST NEWS | PAUL SCOTT

PAUL SCOTT on view in the US Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, (Sampler Jug No:10), Shelburne & Sugar. Transfer print collage on pearlware jug with platinum lustre. Paul Scott 2024....

INQUIRE


Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.

If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message