Quiet: Charlene Scott & Roanne O’Donnell
This exhibition at Upright Gallery brings together two Scottish based artists, Charlene Scott and Roanne O'Donnell, whose works are calm, contemplative and understated.
About Quiet: Charlene Scott & Roanne O’Donnell
Charlene Scott
Based in East Lothian, Scott recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art. With a growing awareness of climate crisis and an increasingly uncertain world, Scott’s work encourages a meaningful and caring relationship with natural materials and seasonal cycles, building a balance between a process-led and a research-based practice.
Working primarily with the material and extraction of botanical pigments Scott creates works on paper that are characterised by simplicity, repetition and abstraction. This processes has, over time, shifted her practice beyond a curiosity in nature itself to being more about a certain quietude.
Her work has become a kind of homeopathic mechanism that resembles the process and gestures of its making. Through slightness, mark making and the employment of materials such as paper and cloth, she explores the essence of this relationship with the environment that 'con-spires' with plants in celebration of the quiet and undramatic.
Scott has received the James Cumming Award for Draughtsmanship and the RSA John Kinross Travel Scholarship. She was also recently awarded The Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Award, Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Award, Glasgow Print Studio Award and a NHS Lothian Charity Tonic Arts Award (Purchase Prize) at the RSA New Contemporaries 2024 exhibition at the RSA in Edinburgh.
Roanne O’Donnell
Born in St. Andrews, O’Donnell is an award-winning Scottish painter with eighteen years of professional practice in Northern Norway, she now has studios in Spain and Scotland.
The subject of O’Donnell’s work is the process of making and repetition. With limitation, restriction and repetition, an exact set of materials and a constrained mark-making action, she has deliberately controlled its painfully slow development and direction. It is a twenty three year investigation and continuing. Her practise concentrates on the horizontal line on paper. Carriers and binders are limited to oil and cold wax. Pigments are restricted to charcoal and graphite. The physical process is the repetitive action of mark-making, bending over paper laid flat and moving her paint mixtures to create a line, over and over, again and again. The concept is a question of gemination. Paraphrasing: Heraclitus of Ephesus. ”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Her rationale is the contention that duplication is impossible. The motivation is to question it.
O’Donnell has exhibited widely all over Europe and in America, with works on display in major collections including The Scottish Office; North Norwegian Museum of Art and The Norwegian Arts Council Collection. She spent five years as Director of Galleri NordNorge, (The Gallery of Northern Norway), collaborating with museums and galleries such as the National Museum of Art in Oslo, showing work by Paul McCarthy, the Norway 10 Designers exhibition while also providing a platform to emerging artists. Her awards include The Norwegian State Stipend for Professional Artists, Norsk kulturråd Arts Council Norway; the Norwegian State Material Award, Norsk kulturråd Arts Council Norway Oslo, Norway; The Cross Gates Gallery Award, Kentucky, USA and Mall Galleries, London; and the Fiera del Levante Prize, ‘Artists in Puglia’. Bari, Italy.
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