Pride Month may be coming to an end, but at Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums our places are safe spaces all year round!
To conclude Pride Month, we asked queer artist Scott Baxter to write a guest blog about our new acquisition, Landscape (Ali) which joined the collection in 2022.
Last year I was delighted to have one of my screen prints, Landscape (Ali), 2022, purchased by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums for their permanent collection. As a queer artist this was a significant moment for me and for the representation and visibility of queer artists within national institutions. For Pride Month 2023, I have been asked to write a blog about my artistic process and the themes of queer identity in my work.
My practice examines queer identity, performativity (how we express our identities) and imagery created with digital technology (such as smart phones), which is now an everyday part of creating a person’s visibility in the world. My work also responds to historical and contemporary queer (in)visibility by subverting our traditional understandings of social allegories, and imagery, to create new altered contexts for queer realities to exist. The work I make often depicts multiple temporalities of bodies in action, bodies in transition and the evanescent experiences touch.
Ross, Pav, Iain Litho print test by Scott Baxter
For me, making art is way to understand the world around me: how I observe it, how I interact with it and how I am moved by it. I also make art as a form or representation and as a voice for my community. Many queer artists struggle to find a platform to express their identities and experiences of society. I believe it is important to have my queer identity at the centre of my work in the hope that it gives other queer emerging artists the agency to make their own work with confidence in who they are.
During Covid I made a series of small works at home and shared them for discussion with peers through social media and zoom tutorials. I was encouraged to explore screen printing as a form of practice as my work could lend itself to this. I decided to undertake a course at Edinburgh Printmakers under the tuition of Anupa Gardner and have been making screen prints ever since endeavouring to pursue it as an experimental form of making.
Landscape (Ali), 2022, Scott Baxter © The Artist
My work, Landscape (Ali) is a collaborative work. When I work with a sitter (model), I take time to explore ideas with them encouraging proposals and concepts to come from them as well as myself. I believe that this creates a work that encompasses a stronger identity of the sitter than if I had total control over the project. Working with a sitter is usually a photographic project encompassing various scenarios, lighting, props, and locations. From there I take time to reflect on the photographs to see what narratives emerge. In the case of Landscape (Ali), the sitter’s movement turning over on a sofa, captured in multiple photographic frames, set up the undulations and peaks of a fictional landscape, a landscape of the body. The work is made with translucent layers of black pigment that are overlaid multiple times to uncover combined images with extreme depths of tone that create a nuanced ethereal work that reveals itself to the viewer over time. I am also currently exploring the use of laser etching in my work to create further translucent layers on paper and wood.
Through a Creative Scotland / Edinburgh City Council Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award (VACMA) in 2022 I was able to develop my printmaking practice in photo-plate lithography – a process originally developed for printing newspapers and magazines. This process has allowed me to create a new dialogue between photography and CMYK separation print making to produce new ways to explore the printed image.
Although I have predominantly become a printmaker, my practice still employs a multi-disciplinary approach, incorporating photography, printmaking, object making and writing.
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