Born in Plymouth, Devon (1964) Gary Scott has recently returned to his home city after many years living in London. Gary’s work has been widely exhibited including at the Royal College of Art, ING Discerning Eye, the Cork Street Open, KPMG’s Canary Wharf HQ and at Waterperry House, Oxford. He is collected internationally, with owners as far afield as New York, Barbados and Brisbane. As well as his Gallery work he has undertaken numerous commissions including the memorial sculpture, ‘Free Spirit’ situated in the heart of St Ives in Cornwall and publicly visible. He completed an MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in London in 2018, achieving a Merit.
Scott makes paintings and sculptures that interrogate the relationship between people and place. He examines how history, memory, co-dependency, and perception influence us and our environment, reflected in the traces we leave behind.
Interactions with his local landscape are evidenced through curious casts of rock pools, collections of discarded litter, mud, and pebbles, united in the studio with pure pigment, gold leaf and psychedelic car spray paint.
These layers of sumptuous, dazzling paint, plaster, shells, and seaweed reflect strata of time and experience, like the annual growth rings in a tree, shaping our internal and external worlds.
Flotsam and jetsam create densely encrusted reliefs; each form winks from a futuristic moon-like surface, some puncturing the facade, some half-buried, gasping for air. Each terrain reveals stories within stories, each texture, mark, object questioning their own significance and use-value, resonating together in a new fossilised cosmology. These works suggest a fertile life-force through multiplicity, interconnected forms, and perspectives.
Copper, gold, and bronze barnacle encrusted vessel sculptures posture as precious, flaunting their contrariness with a startling and contrasting interior shell. A web of scrim is left exposed at the edges, reminding us how fragile every solid is, like a boulder worn away by the ebb and flow of the tide.
Biomorphic forms dance and flirt with each other, their discordant colours ensuring they stay resolutely individual despite their attempt at coupling.
In Scotts’ world, nothing is to be taken for granted; what appears organic is synthetic, what appears natural is fake. Seemingly robust, hard surfaces are fragile, delicate forms are rock solid. Ambiguous, and androgynous, Scott wilfully distorts perception to reflect beauty in the everyday. Desire and stability are in constant flux, morphing in tone, type, and touch. This dynamic unpredictability and tender awkwardness are intended to seduce and challenge our perception and assumptions.