Maggie Scott

Maggie Scott is a British textile artist.

If you are interested in Maggie’s work please email all enquiries to maggie@maggiescott.co.uk

Artist Statement

As a visual artist, Maggie Scott’s work is created from the particularity of who she is: a Black woman, a feminist, a daughter, a mother, an activist and a British textile artist.

Scott’s large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the laborious process of felting. Her hand-felted re-interpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of the representation and tensions and contradictions of a Black British identity.

For many years photography and, specifically, self-portraiture have played a key role in all of Scott’s work. While most of the manipulated images become textiles, each series of work generates ‘stand alone’ photographs or more recently, video installations and short films.

Scott’s current work continues to explore the experience of Black British women in childbirth. She is also preoccupied with the climate emergency and the consequences for women of the global south.

Artist Biography

After 20 years selling her textiles to wear at craft fairs all over the UK and Europe, the decision to focus on visual art for exhibition, resulted in: ’NEGOTIATIONS – black in a white majority culture’ a one woman show for a major UK Museum The New Walk Art Gallery in Leicester.

As a consequence, invitations to show pieces from the exhibition meant Maggie’s work has been in group shows in the USA including: Fiberart International in Pittsburgh, Franklin G Burroughs Art Museum in South Carolina, The American Textiles History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts, Contemporary Textile design, Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts. Tennessee.

Her later work ‘Zwarte Piet’ was also exhibited in the US at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan.

You can see examples of her work in the catalogues of From Lausanne to Beijing 8th International Fiber Biennale;

World of Threads festival - Oakville, Canada; International Textile Art Biennial in Haacht, Belgium, and Perceptions of Self(ie) The Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts, Watertown. MA USA.

Moving her studio back from France to the UK in 2019, her felted work has been exhibited and sold in her new home town of Hastings, in addition to the USA. Her portrait prints continue to be shown in major group shows in London - like Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize Exhibition.

Currently, the large felted pieces in her studio are all part of an ongoing series called ‘5 Times more’ – referring to the statistic that Black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.

The work, which will include felted as well as printed images, should be completed and ready to show by the beginning of next year. Working outside of her studio she is preparing an installation, (as part of the Coastal Current festival), at the Zuzushii Gallery on ‘landfill and fast fashion’, as well as curating “We are here”, an exhibition of local black artists for Black History Month.