27/02/2026
INSTALMENTS: Charlene Scott
26 February - 28 March 2026
Ingleby is pleased to announce the next artist in our INSTALMENTS series: Charlene Scott.
Charlene Scott (b. 1972, Edinburgh) works primarily with botanical pigments to make works on paper notable for the economy of their means and method, and yet, for all their apparent minimalism, they offer a subtle and constantly shifting visual experience as shapes and shadows come alive and dissolve from different angles and changing light.
Patterns develop intuitively or are distilled from small details observed in Scott’s surroundings and everyday life - a picket fence, a tiled floor, lines of sunlight filtered through blinds. Place is important, both in the specific site of her garden from which she gathers the flowers, leaves, roots and seeds from which her pigments are developed, and more widely in a relationship with the Scottish landscape where she has always lived and worked.
Scott trained as a holistic therapist and is alert to the healing properties of plants and botanicals, as well as their use in the traditions and techniques of natural dyers and bookbinders. Yet her work is also inherently contemporary - nodding to Agnes Martin’s radical distillation of form and Roger Ackling’s material-driven engagement with the natural world. Stitching, sewing, tending, harvesting, gathering, crushing, pouring, stirring, watching, waiting, her approach is methodical and meditative, as she puts it ‘these slow material-based processes allow my mind to wander, a kind of emptying out that creates space for quietude and wonder much like my experience of nature.’
Pictured: Charlene Scott, 'diamond grid', 2025-2026
botanical pigments on paper
118.2 x 81.9 cm (frame)
Photographs: John McKenzie
