RITISH
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Paul Scott

By Amy Gogarty

The North-West Ceramics Foundation is pleased to announce Paul
Scott as the featured speaker at a free public lecture Friday, Oct. 14
at 7 p.m. The lecture is entitled Landscape, Pattern and Promiscuity: A
story of confected landscapes, their travels through media, material, cultures
and geographies and will be held at Emily Carr University on Granville
Island. All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Paul Scott lives and works in a small village in Cumbria, Northern
England. Known internationally as the author of Ceramics and Print
(A&C Black, 1994/2002) and Painted Clay: Graphic Arts and the Ceramic
Surface (Watson-Guptil, 2000), he has taught workshops on the Vitrified
Print across Europe, Australia and North America. In 2010, he received
his PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University for his research
project Ceramics, Landscape, Remediation and Confection, and, in 2011,
he was appointed Professor 2 Ceramics at the National Academy of the
Arts in Oslo, Norway. Scott's work can be found in numerous private
and public collections including the National Museum in Stockholm,
Sweden; the National Decorative Arts Museum Norway; the Museum
of Art and Design in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. He has completed many public commissions including a sixty-
metre length of printed porcelain tiling as part of a 300-metre Flood
Defence Wall in Maryport, Cumbria; artwork for the Contemporary
Craft Collection of the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead; a thirty-metre
section of the Hanoi Mosaic Mural in Vietnam, and, in 2012, he will
complete a life-sized printed porcelain tree form for a public sculpture
garden and arboretum in Denmark.

Scott’s academic research focuses on historical archives of blue and
white ceramic decoration found in Britain, Scandinavia, Eastern
Europe and elsewhere. He is particularly interested in print technology
as it relates to European pastoral landscape painting and to the concept
of the picturesque, a mainstay of late-eighteenth-century artistic
discourse. At that time, transfer processes using copper plates were
developed to print detailed imagery onto ceramic objects of everyday

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter : October 2041

Spode Milkmaid, by Paul Scott.

use, creating domestic visual environments in which landscape images
circulated as powerful, if subliminal, markers of cultural values and
norms. Scott uses the term “cultural wallpaper” to describe their
ubiquitous, if unacknowledged, presence. Like wallpaper, they contain
and define an environment while functioning largely outside serious
art historical discourse, which values originality and uniqueness over
mechanically reproduced multiples. Museums have not always seen fit
to preserve mass-produced objects, a situation
Scott criticizes as failing to appreciate their
significance in people’s everyday lives. He
insists that “industrial ceramics are still used by
many people as an art form. It has a relevance
to their lives.”

Acknowledging its intrinsic and subversive
power, Scott adopts the visual style of this
discredited aesthetic to produce thoughtful and
critical works. He constructs highly artificial,
theatrical views and artefacts by compounding
a miscellany of elements, a process he refers to
as “confecting.” Mixing vintage and modern
ceramics with printed designs and hand-built

Continued on Page 5,
Blue and white semiotic

Spode Closed (Kilns) Casserole,
by Paul Scott.