Five Times More: In Conversation with Maggie Scott

Artist Maggie Scott. Image courtesy of John Cole

Maggie Scott believes you need to surround yourself with beautiful things. For years the words practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty hung on the wall of her studio. These words resonate deeply with Maggie, who in many respects, would love to feel completely relaxed creating beautiful things. 

But Maggie feels compelled to make art that is going to affect change in some way. 

A Black woman, a feminist, a mother, an activist and an artist, Maggie’s identity is woven into her work.

Maggie spent most of her career working in two distinct spaces; as a craftsperson making wearable felted textiles, and as an activist. However, 2012 and an exhibition at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester changed this. 

The exhibition gave Maggie the opportunity to create narrative works, thus enabling her to combine her work as a textile artist with her work as an activist. Through this, she was able to develop a technique, which engaged her textile skills to create large-scale narrative works. By printing photographs on large silk chiffon sheets, and then softening the image using a method known as nuno-felting, which involves pushing fibres through silk, Maggie creates intensely coloured and highly textured works. 

While the beauty of Maggie’s work; the colours, the textures, the engaging subjects, make them visually compelling, while the narrative of each work is often shrouded in personal and political anguish. 

Maggie’s work explores the politics of representation and the tensions and contradictions of a Black identity, often drawing on the experiences of herself and her Mother as they navigated life as Black British women; the politicisation of their bodies, their hair, their health. These works have become a means through which Maggie can channel her anger about the on-going systematic inequality experienced by Black people, and the normalisation of racist practises like Zwarte Piet. 

Maggie’s works not only act as an outlet for the artist, they also attempt to engage her audience in the issues of racism and inequality; in the lives of Black people. 

Maggie’s current project Five Times More speaks to another experience she shares with her mother and now her daughter; that of childbirth. But while Maggie’s mother had a terrible experience with childbirth, and Maggie’s own experience was also difficult, she felt compelled to create the project after reading the UK government response that confirmed the  extraordinary difference in pregnancy outcomes for Black and Asian women versus White women. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Maggie about Five Times More. 

Five Times, 2020, nuno felted and stitched silk chiffon and merino wool, 119cm x 166cm.

How does your activism inform your art? 

I would say it’s central to my art. In 2008, when I was awarded a bursary from ‘the shape of things’ I took the decision to stop making textiles to wear, and my focus went into creating textiles with a clear narrative.  One part of the bursary award was a solo exhibition in a major UK museum. For my show, titled, Negotiations – Black in a White Majority Culture, the catalyst was my personal history. Of course, the personal is political, so for example, the felted textile called Towards the End was about my Mother's abrupt death but also about the over-representation of people of colour caught in the mental health system. 

I talked about the early messages I, and countless other Black children received growing up in a White majority culture and referenced Enid Blyton’s ‘Three Gollywogs’ and television’s ‘Black and White Minstrel Show.’ I talked about hair straightening and the feeling that as a Black child, you need to be ‘fixed’ or what you were was not quite right or not enough.

I also had the opportunity to create an installation about the skin lightening industry and how, as we internalised the racism that equates beauty with whiteness, we are targeted and feel we must lighten our skin. So, in a sense, my activism is always at the base of my work. 

Zwarte Piet Felt Portraits // 3, 2014, hand felted silk chiffon and merino wool, 61cm x 99cm. Photo: Hans Poot.

Zwart Piet - the Black servant/slave, who accompanies Saint Nicolas at Christmas in Holland, was the catalyst for several years' work. The earlier pieces, including a short film, photomontages and sets of large felted portraits, are direct critiques of this quaint (and offensive) Dutch ritual. I hope the images portrayed my anger and also my support for Quincy Gario and the ‘Zwarte Piet is racism’ movement. 

But after a while it became less interesting to shout about my ‘victimhood’ and I developed an image of ‘alter ego’, a different and powerful blackface portrait to change the narrative. The felted textiles and photographic portraits in the series ‘BIG SISTER’ invite the viewer to re-evaluate Zwarte Piet, no longer the child-like fool, but a commanding adult female presence with a very different agenda! The scale of the portraits was very important, in fact the first versions of BIG SISTER were standard size (about 60cm x 80 cm) and it didn’t work! She needed to be big and fierce and beautiful.

Zwarte Piet’s BIG SISTER Triptych, 2015, hand felted silk chiffon and merino wool, 252cm x 292cm. Photo: Hans Poot. 

How did Five Times More come about?

I have a routine of listening to podcasts in bed when I can’t sleep. One of the programmes that I download is Woman's Hour and within this magazine format there was a piece on Black Women and Neonatal Deaths. I was listening to this in the middle of the night, and I remember thinking I must be half asleep, but in the morning, I checked out the story and was amazed at the statistics. A link to a government petition was on their website. And a few weeks later I received an official email from the UK government confirming exactly what I had heard on the podcast. The title is Improving Maternal Care for Black British Women. It is a two-page document with statistics and links to various studies that they have done, with actually quite a lot of detailed Information County by County of what's going on in the hospitals. 

 Two statements really stood out: Black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than White women, and Black babies have a 121% increased risk of stillbirth. 

I found this astounding, in this day and age. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so shocked if we were talking about the 50s or even the 60s, (I know my mother’s experience with childbirth was horrific), but to read that this is happening now just seemed extraordinary. 

That is how the series Five Times More came about. I notice now that when there's something that continues to bug me and take my attention, it’s probably going to be my next series of work. As a Black woman of my age, there is this kind of stuff coming out all the time. If you want to look for it, you can find it very easily. Mostly I find a way to either filter, or to preserve myself, my sanity, by not engaging or just perhaps feeling that there are other people who are more informed more knowledgeable, younger, more energetic that can deal with this particular issue, but when it's something that keeps coming back to my consciousness then I know I have to do something. 

Ironically, I had gotten the government’s response in June, and I was mulling it over when in August, my daughter came to visit me in my studio and told me she was pregnant! So, it felt like an obligation to publicise this awful reality, but it was also really hard. I felt that as a mother, I couldn't, I didn't want to have that conversation with my pregnant Black daughter. My daughter, who is a human rights activist and very well informed, brought it up herself when she was choosing hospitals for the birth. Of course, she knew all along, but I didn't feel able to talk to her about it, because I was so shocked by it. 

Zwarte Piet’s BIG SISTER, 2015, nuno felted silk chiffon and merino wool, 252 cm x 292 cm. Photo: Hans Poot.

How have you approached the topic of Five Times More in your work?

The nuno felting method I developed for the Negotiations exhibit is fairly reliable and it allows me to paint with fibres, usually with merino wool, laying in colours, I exaggerate or accentuate aspects of the image. The result is a softened version of the original photograph or design. The nature of nuno-felting is that you see the image but the fibre is pushed through the silk, and so if you were to look at it in profile, you could see bits of hair coming up, and that gives it a softness. Colour is hugely important to me, so, I spend quite a long time and care getting the colours right. I try to make something that is very appealing to touch - you want to come closer and touch the fabric. People are attracted to the colours, the textures; the works are agreeable to look at from a distance; you’re drawn to them, the scale of them.  The message may not be evident until you read the title.

The narrative is more obvious in some of my pieces than others, for example in Towards the End, I’ve used a jigsaw. I took a picture of my mother just before she died and made four enormous portraits, which sit together, and in each piece, you see the face of a woman with little pieces of the puzzle missing. In the fourth and last panel, there is kind of a jumble with the face hardly recognisable. So, the work is an obvious metaphor for the mental distress my mother experienced. So, sometimes the imagery itself tells you the story, you don't need to know what's behind it.

Towards the end, 2020, hand felted silk chiffon and merino wool, 127cm x 182cm.

But of late, I've been enjoying working on images that are subtler; you just see something that's rather gorgeous, there is enough going on that you are intrigued to want to know more. The story behind Five Times More is so precise and factual that I want the work to be displayed with the background information; the viewer then being shocked in the same way that I was. 

So, to my process of creating the image to be printed, I tend to research and collect the core image and then combine or blend them with an abstract design. I have a program that collages one image on top of another and I love that process because you never know what you will produce – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t! However, every now and then that’s it – it's magic! I also know that I want to have four or five core pieces because there are always spring offs from each piece, either with a print or subsidiary piece. I still have another couple that I want to do in this series that I haven’t quite had time to do yet. 

What do you want your audience to take away from Five Times More, and your work more broadly?

I think part of having artwork as activism or activism as artwork is that you're constantly looking for ways to stimulate people into action. What I want is for people to engage in the subject. The issues raised by Five Times are not being talked about until now with the Black Lives Matter movement. It's one of the things that are being listed when people are talking about institutionalised racism. So, it is out there on that sort of level, which is great. 

But what I really want people to do is engage with the subject and engage with the lives of Black people. I feel sort of obligated in a way and a deep desire to get the message out, but there is some sadness. Part of me yearns to have a life as an artist where I feel completely relaxed about felting flowers or something of beauty, and I do believe you need to surround yourself with beauty. The phrase ‘practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty’ was hung up on my studio wall for years, but I suppose I feel compelled to produce work that's going to affect change in some way. 

Five Times (Detail) , 2020, nuno felted and stitched silk chiffon and merino wool, 119cm x 166cm.

What can we expect from you next? 

I’m just finishing a project called Stop – a message to my beloved allies. It’s being sponsored by the Hastings Art Museum and is a response to Black Lives Matter and my local group in Sussex. We had such a huge response to a local rally in the park; it was wonderful to see so many White allies coming together wanting, and some of them determined that things must change. 

In terms of Textile projects, I have two others on the go alongside Five Times More. One is about to the anti-abortion legislation in Poland and the extraordinary coat hanger protests and demonstrations. I’m using more stitch than felt on old Kantha bedspreads from India. 

The images of Polish women in different settings look at what it would mean to ordinary women if they no longer had the option of an abortion. I know from my mother's generation that the reality was - particularly if you were poor and didn't have resources - backstreet abortions or coat hangers. 

 I’m very pleased with how they are developing; there’s something about slowly stitching the work, making it very personal, which feels important. 

Another body of work I am working on got galvanized when I read a lovely and very funny book called Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. I loved the way the author, Reni Eddi-Lodge, discussed racism. In one section she talks about a young Black boy and all the obstacles he is likely to face; how he is more likely to be excluded from school, how he is more likely to get a lower degree and so on. She takes you through the life cycle of a Black man, and I love that way of illustrating structural inequality. I've been toying for many years to just do a set of portraits of Black men to say something about the extraordinary fear that the majority White culture has about Black men, you know that thing where White people will cross the road when they see a Black man walking toward them, and all those assumptions and stereotypes played out about Black men. I haven’t printed anything yet, but I’ve collected about ten core images that I want to work with.

My problem is always lack of time – not lack of ideas!

Follow Maggie Scott on Instagram: @maggiescottonline

https://maggiescottonline.com/

Katie Lynch,

Contributor, MADE IN BED