judith & shields.! – judith scott meets tribal art

After 35 years of isolation due to the diagnoses of Down syndrome and deafness, the object artist Judith Scott (1943 Cincinnati, Ohio – 2005 Oakland, California), to whose work a major solo exhibition was dedicated in Austria for the first time, expressed her talent in handling yarns, fabric remnants, and everyday materials at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Following a visit to the studio by textile artist Sylvia Seventy, Judith Scott discovered her totally independent, immensely expressive style. She took wool, twine, and thread—often interpreted as “female” materials—and wove the found textiles into superb organic sculptures. She wrapped, tied, bound, covered—objects of everyday life vanished underneath the thick layers of vividly colored skeins. She thereby created objects that were not to be found in art history up to that point.

The exhibited works originated from the collection of the Creative Growth Art Center as well as from private collections.

The works of Judith Scott were exhibited alongside shields.!, shields from the highlands of New Guinea. In that context, then, an artist from the 20th century, who worked with a material still held to be “female”—wool and twine—encountered a male-dominated, still stone-age warrior society.

Diese Ausstellung zeigt Objekte nebeneinander, wie sie unterschiedlicher nicht sein könnten: „Weibliche“ Wolle in den Händen einer Frau, die damit Werke zeitgenössischer Kunst schuf, ohne jemals an der Kunst ihrer Zeit interessiert oder gar zu Lebzeiten darin integriert gewesen zu sein, sowie „männliche“ Objekte einer Jahrtausende früher angesiedelten Kultur, die primär einem kriegerischen gesellschaftlichen Ritual dienten. Beide haben eines sichtlich gemeinsam: die Ursprünglichkeit – eine nicht durch Normen und Tendenzen beeinflusste künstlerische Produktion.

This exhibition presented works side by side that could not be more different from each other:  “feminine” wool in the hands of a woman who created contemporary art without ever having taken an interest in the art of her day, or even having been part of its world during her lifetime; and “masculine” objects, hailing from a culture that is removed from today by millennia, which primarily served a wartime social ritual. The two have one thing visibly in common: primitiveness—production that is not influenced by norms and trends.