Sandra 
Scott

Born in Barbados, Sandra Scott is a textile artist, quilter, painter and printmaker. She studied Art Education at The Jamaica School of Art – now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts – before moving to Cambridge, where she continued to develop her artistic practice while raising a family. She completed her MA in printmaking at the Cambridge School Art, Anglia Ruskin University.  

​​​

Her current work offers meditations on memory and forgetting, as well as reflections of the Caribbean landscape. Scott's process begins with sketches, which are subsequently transformed across different media, developing – through phases of construction, de-construction and re-construction – into vibrant, textural multi-dimensional artworks.

 

Scott’s practice honours, and develops, the rich and extensive tradition of textile art as a medium for female self-expression, storytelling and sociopolitical resistance. Thoroughly conceptual, reflective and historically informed, Scott’s work interrogates received wisdoms and imposed narratives with a fresh eye and a healthy disregard for traditional boundaries. 

 

Scott's artistic philosophy can be likened to that of Etel Adnan (1925-2021), the celebrated Lebanese-American artist whose paintings, tapestries and leporellos embodied an understanding of vision as ‘multidimensional and simultaneous’. Scott's profoundly layered thematic exploration recalls Adnan's statement that ‘[t]he actual space of painting – its very dimensions – is the space of memory'.

​

Scott’s use of form, structure and colour is as boldly innovative as it is masterful; her incorporation of sewn, sculpted, dyed and painted elements, as well as her own handmade paper, showcases the extraordinary depth and diversity of her technical skill. She is drawn to the use of non-traditional materials (such as tissue paper and organza fabric, evoking the fragility and ephemerality of memory): and especially to interactions between the traditional and the non-traditional.

​

'My practice investigates ways of combining print-making and embroidery across of range of material and surfaces, using objects as metaphors and symbols to communicate my thoughts and ideas. I take pleasure in creating dialogue between and across the materials I use, as well as between the viewer and the subjects I explore. My process allows me to create new narratives that also pay homage to the past.' Rooted in her personal experience, Scott's work transcends cultural contexts, providing space to dream; to question and revise; to let our imaginations roam.

​

Sandra Scott's work has been exhibited in Barbados, Jamaica, the UK and the USA, and is held in a number of public collections – including the Jamaican Ministry of Education and the Barbados Alzheimers Association – as well as in private collections internationally. Two of her quilts have been acquired for the Permanent Collection of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, and have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in 2023.