Lotte Scott: Ashen

Drawings in charcoal and lime wash, marking the impact of ash dieback disease on the Mendip landscape.

Lotte won the solo exhibition prize at our Art Open in 2019 and we’re thrilled to finally welcome her to the Long Gallery after delays due to lockdown and the covid pandemic.

Lotte Scott was born in 1990 and grew up in Somerset. She studied BA Art Practice at Goldsmiths University and MFA Sculpture at the Slade School of Art, graduating in 2017. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Gilchrist Fischer Award. Lotte’s work examines the relationship between place, time and material, with a particular focus on Somerset landscapes. An interest in archaeology and geology also informs her practice. Lotte lives and works in her hometown of Castle Cary.

Between 2013-2020 Lotte’s work centred on the peat moors of the Somerset Levels, exploring the indexical nature of peat as a living archive of land and people. Photographs, sculptures and drawings celebrated the low lying, moors as a place of suspension and transformation. More recently she has been working with the limestone landscapes of the Isle of Portland and the Mendip Hills – drawn to Portland as a place of extraction and absence, and to the ancient burial sites of Mendip.

Lotte’s works are informed by small scale, historic industries that have shaped rural landscapes over the centuries. Charcoal making has been integral to her practice for the last 15 years, used to create both drawing materials and sculptures. Having made lime from Portland stone for her 2021 B-side Festival piece Stone Grove, Lotte now uses charcoal and lime as counterpoint materials – both carbon rich substances, transformed through fire.

Themes of loss, preservation and disintegration recur in Lotte’s work. The earth materials she employs are transformed, but not fixed – her pieces often spread, shift and disintegrate over time. Lotte is overtly an environmentalist with a mission to speak of and from the land. In an age of disconnection and over-consumption, her art invites reverence for material and place.

Lotte was a double winner in the Black Swan Arts Open 2019 for her piece ‘Hyle’. She won the Long Gallery Solo Show prize chosen by the Programming Group and also the Postscript Prize for 3D work.