Anthony Scott
22 October - 17 November
EDUCATION
University
of Ulster, Belfast, B.A. (Hons) 1st Class 1991
Cardiff Institute of Higher Education, Cardiff, M.A. Caramics
1993
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2007
Beaux Arts, Bath, Solo Exhbition
2000
Sladmore Contemporary, London
Kinsale Gallery, Co. Cork
Blackheath Gallery, Blackheath, London
2006
25 Year Anniversary Exhibition,
1999
Kenny Gallery, Co. Galway
Beaux
Arts Bath
Sligo Art Gallery, Sligo
Royal
Hibernian Society, Dublin
Ormeau Baths, Belfast
2005
Beaux Arts, Bath, Solo Exhibition
1998
Castle Museum, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh
Greenland Gallery, Co. Kerry
1997
Craft Council Purchase Award, Royal Dublin Society
Royal Hibernian Society, Dublin
Crawford Arts Centre, St. Andrews
2004
Beaux Arts, Bath, Summer Exhibition
Bridge Gallery, Dublin
Castle Upton Gallery, Co. Antrim
Old Court House Gallery, Ambleside, Cumbria
Royal Hibernian Society, Dublin
1996
Fitch’s Ark, Little Venice, London
John Martin Gallery, London
1995
Craftworks Gallery, Belfast
2003
Royal Ulster Academy, Ulster
Museum, Belfast
Guinness Gallery, Foxrock, Dublin
Royal
Hibernian Society, Dublin
Blackheath Gallery, Blackheath, London
2002 Solomon Gallery, Dublin 1994 -95 Arts Council Touring Exhibition, N. Ireland
Royal
Hibernian Society, Dublin
COLLECTIONS
The
Arts Council of Northern Ireland
The Barbican Centre, London
Crafts
Council, Ireland
The Castle Museum, Enniskillen
Rhiannon Craft Design Centre, Wales
The Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin
Dame Judi Dench
Daniel Day Lewis
Sir Tony O’Reilly
Lord & Lady Glentoran
Sean O’Criadan/Peter Lamb, Dublin
Brian Keenan
Alexis Fitzgerald
Basil Blackshaw
Barry McGuigan
ANTHONY SCOTT - CATALOGUE ESSAY
The
bronze animals have a sense of being rooted in the ground; solid and patient.
Their surfaces are like stone; the mottled smoothness of pebbles that have been
weathered by the sea. Their physical solidity is matched by a weight of emotion:
sorrow, perseverance, hope. There is a stillness about them that touches our
ancestral farming roots. They are intimate, therapeutic, and subversive.
Scott
comes from a farming background. Thematically his work has an element of the
ordinary – the everyday work horse – which puts people at their ease. Heavy
with the weight of stories, each sculpture is named for a character from Irish
myth, carrying human complexities within an animal form. Scott believes that
it’s the incorporation of human characteristics within the animal that
distinguishes his work. In this he’s deeply influenced by Irish mythology,
especially the Ulster cycle. The ancient tales are full of shape changing. The
Celts believed that the spirit world of animals often impinged on and influenced
the human world, and that the borderlines between the worlds were traversable.
In the legends children are transmogrified into swans by a jealous stepmother, a
goddess appears as a crow on the battlefield, and a deer hunter realises that
his quarry is a young girl under enchantment when his hounds refuse to attack.
It
is to his credit that Scott does not limit himself to the heroic in Irish myth.
Tales of great heroism do exist in the cycles, but for a large part they are
legends of bloodshed, low cunning, and betrayal amongst cattle thieves. A wily
crow, replete with a sense of darkness, is named for Bricriu Poison Tongue,
a lord of some note in the Ulster cycle and a thoroughly unpleasant character. Mebh
IV, the warrior queen, is depicted as a horse, head raised in anguish as she
despairs of finding a warrior who will act as her decoy and lose their life in
the process. She is a devious creature, prepared to offer her daughter to anyone
who will have the courage to fight her battle. It’s a piece that is informed
by myth, but also by the work of Picasso. The sculptural horse, captured in
movement with head thrown back, echoes the powerful distress of the horses in Guernica.
The
sheep, however, is a noble beast. Scott’s magnificent life-size sheep Ram,
Emissary of Connacht is a thickset bronze with an aura of influential
masculinity. The sculpture does much to reinstate the credibility of an animal
that has, except in the work of Nicola Hicks, been too long reduced to
wooliness. The human form is rare in Scott’s work, but not unheard of. He
acknowledges the influence of the Italian artist Marino Marini, clearly shown in
Nuada Restored, a mounted rider with
arms outstretched in celebration. This piece grew from one of the oldest sagas
and represents the healing of Nuada, king of the Celts, who had lost his arm,
and consequently his kingship, in battle. Since only the physically perfect
could rule, the restoration of Nuada’s arm meant that he could also reclaim
his kingship, and the sculpture captures this moment of exaltation.
Scott’s
new work shows developments in his patination, the alchemical process that gives
colour to bronze. It is a process that offers him almost infinite variation: Mebh
IV is the dappled grey green of polished stone; Bricriu
is a pitch black that seems to absorb rather than reflect the light. A pair of
stalwart bulls, Fergus and Naoise, show rough texturing that is quite in keeping
with their manly aspect, but a new departure in Scott’s work, which is usually
smooth. Each is named for a hero of the Ulster cycle, a saga in which there is
considerable overlap, both physical and spiritual, between the warrior and the
bull.
Sometimes,
though, an animal is merely an animal. Hound
of Chulain, a pit bull that combines a look of mischief and menace, was the
guard dog from which the hero Cúchulainn
took his name after killing the dog in self defense. And Bran, a life-size greyhound, is simply the hunting dog of the
legendary hero Fionn
Mac Cumhaill (Finn Mac Cool).
That’s on the surface. Some
versions of the saga would have it that the hound had once lived in human form.
Eleanor Flegg, August 2007