Seam and Transfer: Paul Scott and Fran Siegel

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Seam & Transfer, an exhibition of works by Los Angeles based artist Fran Siegel and British artist Paul Scott. 

In Seam & Transfer, Fran Siegel and Paul Scott tell stories of translation and migration with the use of pattern and motif, expanding techniques of collage and reassembly within the traditionally conventional mediums of ceramics, drawing and tapestry to communicate a subverted, contemporary message.

Informed by place, Siegel’s work in Seam & Transfer traces the migratory history of early European porcelain found in collections from The Huntington Library, the Getty, and during a fellowship at La Napoule Foundation in France. Translated through multiple layers, materials, and processes of mark-making and drawing, cyanotype, image transfer and embroidery on fabric and paper, each stitch and mark carries meaning- there is no detail that does not have significance. For example, Siegel’s suspended drawing, Henri’s Open Fortress (2018/19) melds local plant life with the border patterns she studied in France; Meridian Rig (2017), responds to a massive bridge construction, visible en route from her San Pedro studio adjacent to the Port of Los Angeles. In these pieces, and throughout the exhibition, architectural features are interwoven with natural forms and decorative motifs, which emerge as solid and ephemeral shadows as one contemplates the work.

Siegel was alerted to Scott via Horizon, Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, a book that followed an exhibition of Scott's work at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway (2013/14). The exhibition ‘told a story of landscapes journeying between geographies, media and materials.’ Such ‘journeying’ of printed motifs and patterns on historical ceramics has long been central to Paul Scott’s studio practice. His doctoral research tracks their movements from English potteries across Europe, where they were appropriated by factories in other countries, each time used to represent somewhere geographically different. 

Scott’s cut and collaged Garden pieces In Seam & Transfer, play against our familiarity with, and expectations of, traditional domestic tablewares. Their status is elevated by his use of the Japanese kintsugi method of mending, employing a mixture of resin and gold leaf that celebrates the breakage rather than attempting to disguise it. 

Echoing Siegel’s industrial Meridian Rig are two pieces by Scott that reflect his environmental concerns. On an antique pearl-ware, shell-edged platter, Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s), Arctic Scenery, Kulluk (2014) depicts Shell’s Kulluk oil exploration rig which ran aground off Sitkalidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska in December 2012. On another piece, printed across a cracked antique Danish ironstone platter (c.1850) Scott's Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Residual Waste No. 4 (2017) shows a truck passing an oil refinery in Corpus Christi Texas. The crack has been filled with gold, ‘perhaps,’ he comments, ‘representing all those oil companies making a mint whilst the very structure of the planet is fatally flawed by their greed.’