Project Type: Paul Scott Artwork Series

Across the Borderline (Trumpian Campaigne)

series of platters depicting the border between the US and Mexico using imagery culled from the Wedgwood archive and popular media to address the theme of immigration.nt riots in Birmingham, AL.

After Wood and Warhol

A collaboration with Mara Superior, who created the handmade porcelain platter, that nods to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (1964) depicting Civil Rights Movement riots in Birmingham, AL. Warhol’s series Race Riot was based on Charles Moore’s photographs featured in Life Magazine depicting unarmed Black protesters set upon by police and their dogs on May 3, 1963. To create this platter, Scott handpainted Warhol’s screenprint. The shell border is a reference to a motif on a platter by Enoch Wood, Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast Africa (c. 1820), that depicts a slave ship—a perfect exemplar of the way that historic transferwares cloaked deeply racist histories in beautiful forms.

The Angola 3

souvenir plate drawing reference to inmates in the Louisiana State Penitentiary who were held in solitary confinement for the longest period in American history. It is suspected that this unethical treatment was retaliation for the inmates’ connection to the Black Panther Party.

Pipelines & Peltier

souvenir plate of Leonard Peltier, an indigenous activist and enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, who has been in jail for more than 43 years for the unjust conviction of the murders of two FBI Special Agents.

Souvenir of Portland, OR

souvenir plates referencing the ongoing (2020-2021) Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin

Souvenir of Providence

souvenir plate of Providence, RI superimposed with an image of the Cape Coast Castle platter, an infamous Rowland & Marsellus pattern depicting a slave ship off the Gold Coast of Africa that is in the collection of the RISD Museum and Brown University, both in Providence.

Souvenir of Selma

souvenir plate commemorating Bloody Sunday and the marches for civil rights in 1956 in Selma, AL.

Souvenir of Shiprock and The Uranium Series

souvenir plates and pearlware platters referencing the environmental destruction and detriment to the health of workers from the Navajo Nation as a result of uranium mining from Shiprock and other mines in the Cove Area of Arizona. All works in this series incorporate a melted piece of uranium glass and a selection of works also include a melted shard of a Corona beer bottle.

“New American Cites, Flint, Belle Island & The Ghost Gardens of Detroit”

I grew up in Birmingham, Britain’s ‘Motor City’, where the local economy relied on car manufacturers…. Austin, Morris (later British Leyland), Mini, Rover and all the associated motor suppliers. As a student in the early 1970’s, holiday working included ‘industrial cleaning’ in the huge Austin works in Longbridge… then two summers were spent in an engineering factory in Balsall Heath, assembling brake pipe adjuster clamps (amongst other things). When car production eventually ceased in the city, unemployment, and the impoverishment of communities swiftly followed. I clearly recall the dereliction, then later demolition of huge industrial sites, and the yawing empty spaces. A few years later, similar scenes also became familiar to me in the Staffordshire pottery towns as the British ceramics industry all but collapsed. I was thus well aware, from first hand experience, of the effects of deindustrialisation on urban environments and communities. A series of early Cumbrian Blue(s) artworks reflected the ruin and decay of my home town in prints and tiled panels…

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California Wildfires

souvenir plate addresses ecological precarity by referencing the most severe wildfire season in California’s history that occurred in 2020.

“New American Scenery, New York and Transferwares”

In the early part of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of printed blue and white tablewares from England were exported to North America. Scenes of the newly independent United States were used in a myriad of designs and were characterized by a deep blue semiotic. Alongside printed wallpapers and textiles these transferwares formed part of the new media of their day. Pictorial in nature, their vitrified designs remediated prints from book or magazine illustration, melding them with floral and botanical borders. By the end of the century, they became highly collectible and the subject of a number of books, including RT Haines Halsey’s classic ‘New York on Dark Blue Staffordshire Pottery’. Published in 1899, the limited edition tome plotted the history of the genre, illustrated by sumptuous photogravures in blue depicting a comprehensive range of pictorial transferwares. 120 years later, in my New American Scenery series of artworks I updates some of these early subject matters of New York using 21st century alternatives.

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Fleur.de.Sel’s New York

series of souvenir plates depicting New York City streetscapes drawn from the Instagram account @Fleur.de.Sel that appear timeless, illustrating the small businesses and cultural diversity that are increasingly at risk with the city’s dangerously inflated wealth gap.

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Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, “Fleurs.de.sel’s New York”, 2019, (set of twelve plates), In-glaze screen print (decal) on salvaged Syracuse China with pearlware glaze., 11 x 11 x 1″, 11″ or 28 cm diameter (each plate)

Stop, Keat’s & Palm Too… 511 Too… Chicken Place…Mexicana… Laundry Project 23, ChelseaHypermarket, Chelsea Square… Canal Street…. Stairs 361… Hot Dogs…. Village Pizza… Pizza Park… Ray’s Pizza, Jakes Saloon, Meatballs.