This artist's book is a documentation of the production, installation, and decomposition of Samara Scottis solo exhibition “Silk at Eastside Projects”, Birmingham, in 2015. For the project, Scott gathered materials such as eyeshadow, cistern block, tapioca, pipe-cleaners, scented candles, graphite, mustard, solar reflective roofing paint, aquarium gravel, and red wine, among others.
“Scott's works are neither image nor objects, neither figurative nor abstract. They are recognizable things arranged in an unfamiliar order floating in a foreign substance.”
Isobel Harbison
Scott's exotically prosaic worlds of poured and pooled misused materials—household chemicals, soft drinks, toilet paper, scented waxes, noodles, eye shadow and toothpaste—cascade, smear and mould into an archipelago of voids cut into the concrete of Eastside Projects. Liquid surfaces cling to the floor existing as moist films, laminations and horizontal screens.
Scott's artworks contain all passages of what follows the first contact of the consumer experience, from the touch to mastication to assimilation and finally dispersal. Her works appear to have been spontaneously configured, slipping between infusions of nature and artificial imitation, antiquity and plasticity, synthetic import and organic craft class.
The title “Silks” suggests an idea of movement, touching and indirect skins, reflecting the artist's urge to make tangible the bodily, gastric veneers of our digital and chemical realities. Scott's transformative mirroring of language and materials is typical of her never typical artworks that slither and dance around the edge of seduction and consumption.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, from May 16 to July 11, 2015.
Samara Scott (born 1985 in London) has developed a practice fuelled by the context of hyper-consumerism. This has resulted in poisonously coloured installations made through "hijacking" manufactured objects and organic or chemical by-products of mass production. Before each exhibition, she experiments extensively with the resistance and aesthetic performance of the large array of materials that make up her artworks, such as sponges, toilet paper, nail polish, lettuce leaves, fabric softener, cigarette ash, toothpaste, candles, tights, and tin foil.
After completing a Bachelor's degree at Camberwell College of Art in 2008, Samara Scott graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011. Selected solo shows include
Belt and Road, Tramway, Glasgow (2018);
Jacobs Creek, The Sunday Painter, Offsite / Four Six One Nine, Los Angeles;
Developer, Pumphouse & Battersea Park, London (both 2016);
Silks, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015). Selected group shows include
The Happy Fact, La Casa Encendida, Madrid;
Day Tripper, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (both 2019);
Voyage, Bergamin & Gomide, São Paulo (2017–18);
Days are Dogs,
Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate (both 2017);
I am a Painting, Kumu Museum, Tallinn (2014).
