Joseph Clark Collection

Rachel Scott

Born 1940, Buckinghamshire · Hand-spun, hand-woven wool rugs

Rachel Scott (born 1940) is a British artist who weaves rugs from wool she spins herself from the undyed fleeces of British sheep breeds. She trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art and has shown with Make Hauser & Wirth in Somerset and Southampton, New York.

In the collection

Untitled XXVI, 2020Handwoven sheep's-wool rug

About the artist

Rachel Scott, born Rachel Tripp on 20 April 1940 in Fulmerchase, Buckinghamshire, is known professionally as Rachel Scott or Rachel Scott Bowling, and is married to the painter Frank Bowling (Wikipedia). She studied in the Painting School at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1964 and was elected a member of the London Group (Rachel Scott). Her paintings of rooms, passages and staircases gave way to Dorset landscapes in the late 1970s, and she stopped painting in 1979 (Wikipedia).

She began spinning and weaving in 1976, when the stair carpet at home was wearing out (Rachel Scott). She spins the wool herself, undyed, from fleeces of British breeds such as Shetland, Manx Loaghtan, Black Welsh Mountain and Herdwick, so that the colours are those of the sheep, and weaves on an upright frame loom in straight lines that make geometric shapes (Rachel Scott). She weaves in the mornings and spins in the evenings, making between 20 and 30 rugs a year (Artnet News).

Make, Hauser & Wirth's craft space in Bruton, Somerset, showed her rugs, early paintings and clay pieces in 2022–23 (Artnet News), and in 2023 Make Southampton in New York opened its summer season with With My Hands, pairing rugs with early oil paintings (Hauser & Wirth).

Rachel Scott

In the collection

About the artist

Sources

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