I am an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK, whose work explores ways of visualising and communicating environmental change through the use of performance, installation, film, photography and sound.
Combining art, science and personal experiences, I create work that reflects on humanity’s relationship with the natural world that challenge my own values and abilities, rather than simply delivering a moral message. Journeys are integral to my practice not only as a source of inspiration, but also by being performative works. Since 2017, she has cycled and sailed approximately twenty thousand miles.
I graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA Art and Science in 2017 and BA Arts and Design in 2000. I completed my MSc in Multimedia Application Design from Middlesex University in 2003. I am a member of the Wilderness Art Collective and an alumna of The Arctic Circle artist residency.
I participated in The Arctic Circle artist residency – a two-week expedition sailing along the coast of Svalbard in the High Arctic. I spent the time documenting the environment and marine plastic debris washed up on the beaches. I also collected daily atmospheric deposition samples on behalf of scientists at Kings College London to determine whether plastic particles were present in the air. Following the expedition, I produced Beach Clean – a video documenting our group cataloguing plastic debris on location in Longyearbyen; a video documenting atmospheric deposition sampling at sea; and an ice cast containing collected plastic artefacts, exhibited in London.
Reference: SCOTT039
Title: A Circular Economy
Date: 2021
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Commissioned for the 2021 NOVA X Exhibition.
Media: Film
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: How do social and economic choices in the UK affect planetary wellbeing? What is our individual and collective responsibility? A Circular Economy is a film documenting my journey cycling two-hundred-and-twenty-kilometres around inner London. Following The Capital Ring, one of Transport for London's walking and cycling routes, I pass through suburban streets, shopping centres, ancient woodland, and historic landfill sites, and reflect upon author, Iain Sinclair’s, 2002 observation of the city as “mall-virus, landscape consumerism, retail landfill”, in the context of current environmental tipping points.
Reference: SCOTT040
Title: 100 Seconds To Midnight
Date: 2021
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Commissioned for the 2021 NOVA X Exhibition.
Media: Soundscapes and photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: 100 Seconds To Midnight is an experimental series of six soundscapes, created using field recordings and photographs captured at ten-kilometre intervals, during my two-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre journey cycling around London. You are invited to listen and consider the relationships between consumer culture and environmental change.
Instructions for listening: A new soundscape will be released online each Saturday, at precisely, 100 seconds to midnight, from the 18th September to 24th October 2021. Please use headphones or speakers.
Reference: SCOTT016
Title: The Conspicuous Consumers Tale
Date: 2018
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Pilgrimage
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: A pilgrimage cycling to a series of Amazon warehouses in the UK, thinking of them as cathedrals of consumption. At each location I took a selfie and shared it on social media. I carried a copy of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, and the things that I needed to survive. I cycled 2367 miles from 25th June to 29th September 2018, visiting Amazon warehouses at Bristol, Swansea, Tilbury, Hemel Hempstead, Dunstable, Milton Keynes, Daventry, Coventry, Rugby, Peterborough, Coalville, Doncaster, Dunfermline, Gourock, Bolton, Altrincham and Warrington.
Reference: SCOTT030
Title: Core
Date: 2017
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Recycled high-density polyethylene and polypropylene casts arranged in geological core sample boxes, 185 x 108 x 50 cm
Media: Art object
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: Core is inspired by research paper The deep sea is a major sink for microplastic debris published by the Royal Society Open Science Journal in 2014. Microplastic fibres (anything smaller than 1mm) have been found in abundance in deep-sea sediment core samples from the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.
Reference: SCOTT003
Title: Slice I-V
Date: 2017
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Sliced high-density polyethylene and low-density polyethylene cube casts, 70 x 20 cm.
Media: Art object
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: These casts are inspired by the discovery of new rock classification called plastiglomerates, found on Hawaiian beaches in 2014 and formed of sand, rock and plastic. Slice considers the Anthropocene and the effects of fossil fuel extraction and plastic pollution on Earth’s geology and environment. Each Slice is made from an individually hand moulded recycled plastic cast, sliced to resemble geological rock samples and data map visualisations. Framed using ArtGlass WW.
Reference: SCOTT007
Title: Beach Clean
Date: 2017
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Installation with a time lapse video, collected marine plastic debris cast in ice, and an atmospheric deposition sample.
Media: Film [1m00s]
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: During my residency with The Arctic Circle, marine plastic debris was collected from beaches at Smeerenburg and Fram Bay in Svalbard, as well as daily samples of dust and other particles, which settle out of the atmosphere.
Atmospheric deposition samples were collected on behalf of Dr Stephanie Wright and her team at the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, King’s College London, to assess whether microplastics contaminate the air in this remote location.
Plastic found on the beaches was brought back to Longyearbyen where I recorded a time lapse video documenting our group cataloguing what we had collected. It was screened alongside an ice cast that melted over the course of four days, slowly revealing a selection of the collected plastic artefacts.
Plastic debris collected included: fishing nets, ropes, strapping band, boots, shoes, rubber gloves, bottles, and many miscellaneous plastic fragments.
Reference: SCOTT008
Title: Beach Clean [Process]
Date: 2017
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Installation with a time lapse video, collected marine plastic debris cast in ice, and an atmospheric deposition sample.
Media: Film [2m27s]
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: During my residency with The Arctic Circle, marine plastic debris was collected from beaches at Smeerenburg and Fram Bay in Svalbard, as well as daily samples of dust and other particles, which settle out of the atmosphere.
Atmospheric deposition samples were collected on behalf of Dr Stephanie Wright and her team at the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, King’s College London, to assess whether microplastics contaminate the air in this remote location.
Plastic found on the beaches was brought back to Longyearbyen where I recorded a time lapse video documenting our group cataloguing what we had collected. It was screened alongside an ice cast that melted over the course of four days, slowly revealing a selection of the collected plastic artefacts.
Plastic debris collected included: fishing nets, ropes, strapping band, boots, shoes, rubber gloves, bottles, and many miscellaneous plastic fragments.
Reference: SCOTT011
Title: All This Stuff Is Killing Me
Date: 2019
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Film footage and photographs installed in a 7ft cubed recycled cardboard shipping container; a list of everything I own; purchased and inherited artefacts.
Media: Film [36m02s]
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: A low-carbon footprint journey considering the relationships between mass-consumption, personal identity and environmental change. Beginning in June 2018, I shed material possessions and set off by bicycle, taking only what I needed. Along the way I visited a series of Amazon distribution centres, spent a month at sea onboard a cargo ship, and visited sites of personal significance in the UK and New Zealand .
Reference: SCOTT012
Title: All This Stuff Is Killing Me [Process]
Date: 2019
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Film footage and photographs (35 minutes) installed in a 7ft cubed recycled cardboard shipping container; a list of everything I own; purchased and inherited artefacts.
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: A low-carbon footprint journey considering the relationships between mass-consumption, personal identity and environmental change. Beginning in June 2018, I shed material possessions and set off by bicycle, taking only what I needed. Along the way I visited a series of Amazon distribution centres, spent a month at sea onboard a cargo ship, and visited sites of personal significance in the UK and New Zealand .
Reference: SCOTT025
Title: PlasticAdrift
Date: NA
Author: Dr Erik van Sebille, David Fuchs and Jack Murray
Details: In 1982 the World Climate Research Programme put forward the idea of a standardised global array of drifting buoys.
Media: Website
Credit: plasticadrift.org
Description: These buoys float with the currents just like plastics except they send a short message to scientists every few hours about where they are and the conditions in that location. With this information, the scientists have been able to create a statistical model of the surface pathways of our oceans. The PlasticAdrift website uses this model and generates an animation of the likely path and destination of floating debris over a ten year period, either into the future or into the past.
Reference: SCOTT036
Title: A Line Made By Walking
Date: 1967
Author: Richard Long
Details: Line Made by Walking is a sculpture made when Long walked a continuous line into a field of grass in Wiltshire, England, and then photographed the result.
Media: Installation
Credit: wikipedia.org/A_Line_Made_by_Walking
Description:
Reference: SCOTT037
Title: 0o00 Navigation Part I: A Journey Across England
Date: 2009
Author: Simon Faithful
Details: An obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.
Media: Film [50min37s]
Credit: simonfaithfull.org/0-navigation
Description: Always seen from behind, a figure first swims out of the seawater where the meridian hits the south-coast of Britain at Peacehaven in Sussex. The solitary person emerges out of the water carrying a hand held GPS device and using this implement he proceeds to walk directly north along the 0º00’00” line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via nearest windows, streams waded, hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London, the Midlands and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The figure then slowly swims away into the North Sea heading ever further north.
In 0º00 Navigation the hypothetical, geographic construct that is the zero line of longitude is treated as if it were a real phenomenon – a path mapped out to follow. The Greenwich meridian bisects southern England because it was here that it was once fabricated out of treaties, maps and the mechanics of naval power.
Reference: SCOTT038
Title: Cabinet of Marine Debris
Date: 2014
Author: Mark Dion
Details: Marine-themed objects, displayed in familiar natural history museum cabinet format, selected from litter Dion collected while part of an expedition of researchers, material scientists, and artists.
Media: Installation
Credit: anchoragemuseum.org/cabinet-of-marine-debris
Description: Dion is known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. By appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that go against the grain of dominant culture and question the distinctions between objective (rational) scientific methods and subjective (irrational) influences.
Reference: SCOTT034
Title: Studio [inside]
Date: NA
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: The artist’s inside studio environment
Media: Photograph
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: On the road, I’m always in the present, vulnerable, and open. At my desk, I have time to reflect and experiment. I love this outside/inside - collecting/processing relationship - it keeps me in a state of flux and out of my comfort zone and I think that is key to making work.
Reference: SCOTT035
Title: Studio [outside]
Date: NA
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: The artist’s outside studio environment
Media: Photograph
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: On the road, I’m always in the present, vulnerable, and open. At my desk, I have time to reflect and experiment. I love this outside/inside - collecting/processing relationship - it keeps me in a state of flux and out of my comfort zone and I think that is key to making work.
Reference: SCOTT028
Title: Adventures in the Anthropocene
Date: 2014
Author: Gaia Vince
Details: This book looks at how we are reshaping our living planet and explores how we might engineer Earth for our future.
Media: Publication
Credit: royalsociety.org/adventures-anthropocene
Description: In just a few decades, we humans have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history – we have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary – from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or Age of Man
Reference: SCOTT029
Title: The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
Date: 2019
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Details: A worst-case scenario of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming.
Media: Publication
Credit: wikipedia.org/The_UninhabitableEarth(book)
Description: The article starts with the statement "if your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible."
Reference: SCOTT030
Title: Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
Date: 2012
Author: Sally Weintrobe
Details: Weintrobe brings members of a wide range of different disciplines in the social sciences together in discussion and to introduce a psychoanalytic perspective. The important insights that result have real implications for policy, particularly with regard to how to relate to people when discussing the issue.
Media: Publication
Credit: routledge.com/Engaging-with-Climate-Change
Description: One of the first books to explore in depth what climate change actually means to people.
Reference: SCOTT033
Title: Marine Anthropogenic Litter
Date: 2015
Author: Melanie Bergmann, Lars Gutow and Michael Klages
Details: This book describes how man-made litter, primarily plastic, has spread into the remotest parts of the oceans and covers all aspects of this pollution problem.
Media: Publication
Credit: springer.com/marine-anthropogenic-litter
Description: Marine litter is a prime threat to marine wildlife, habitats and food webs worldwide. This book illustrates how advanced technologies contributed to the broad awareness of marine litter as a problem of global significance. The authors summarise more than five decades of marine litter research, which receives growing attention after the recent discovery of great oceanic garbage patches and the ubiquity of microscopic plastic particles in marine organisms and habitats.
Reference: SCOTT022
Title: Plastic Debris
Date: Various
Author: Hannah Scott
Details: Found plastic debris
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Description: Plastic debris is human-created waste that has deliberately or accidentally been placed in the natural environment.
Reference: SCOTT023
Title: Plastiglomerates
Date: 2019
Author: Kelly Jazvac
Details: Chunks of "plastiglomerate" found by Canadian artist Kelly Jazvac on a Hawaiian beach, illustrating how the anthropocene era is leading to the formation of new man-made minerals.
Media: Material
Credit: kellyjazvac.com/Plastiglomerates
Description: The hybrid material is the result of plastic items washed up on the shore fusing with shells, sand and other natural materials when burnt in campfires lit on the beach.
The ready-made artworks are presented as a marker of the anthropocene, a proposed new geological era where human impact has become the dominant force on the earth's geology.