Maggie Scott

Maggie Scott creates art from the particularity of who she is: a black woman, a feminist, a daughter, a mother, an activist and a British textile artist.

Born in London, Scott graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1976 with BA honours in Fashion Textiles and set up her first studio in London in 1980. Scott became well-known for her sumptuously crafted felt textiles to wear. Her life as a textile artist had existed in parallel with her involvement in gender and race politics, but it was an experiment with a series of large, autobiographical textile pieces which allowed her to combine art an activism.

Her first body of work Negotiations – black in a white majority culture led to a bursary award and a solo show at Leicester Museum in 2012 and ultimately her transition from the world of fashion to the world of fine art. 

Scott’s large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the laborious process of felting, digitally manipulated portraits are printed onto silk chiffon then hand felted and stitched. Her reinterpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of the representation and tensions and contradictions of a black British or black European identity. 

Scott achieved notoriety in 2013 for Zwarte Piet, a body of work exploring the eponymous Dutch phenomenon of ‘blacking up’. Using self-portraiture, she referenced the quaint and offensive Dutch ‘character’ by creating an alter ego for Piet, inviting the viewer to re evaluate Zwarte Piet, no longer the slave or child-like fool, but a commanding adult female presence with a very different agenda.

Scott’s significant body of portraits continue the exploration of conflicting narratives first undertaken in Negotiations; the softness and flexibility of the textures contrasting with the often-uncompromising expression.

Scott is currently working on two projects: Five Times More, a visual response to the recent UK government report on British Black and Asian British pregnancy outcomes and Fast Fashion and Climate Justice’: The  Global North’s Addiction to Cheap Clothing and Landfill in the Global South. Both projects include her trademark large, felted photomontages along with installations and limited-edition prints.

Scott’s works have been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, China and Canada.