Emma Scott-Smith's kitchen table is not just a symbol of family cohesion and succour; it symbolises faith and functions as an alter to that faith. This small cluttered table has at one end a jumble of artist's tools: brushes, paints, colour encrusted palette, and at the other coffee cups, cutlery, lunch.It is a small table and the kitchen is proportionately small.
This assured twenty year old artist paints in acrylic, often achieving large canvases which depict her constant physical pain. The cherry has become her symbol of hope but it is far more than that. This sensuous red fruit is in reality a symbol of her own sexuality and lust which, due to disablement and confinement, finds no other form of expression. Gaunt, grey hollow masks stare out in want. They embody hunger but also suffering. A toothless mouth bites on a cherry consuming hope. A hope that cannot nourish.
At the age of twelve her family doctor prescribed a new antibiotic to relieve congestion resulting in a total reaction with excruciating and continual back pain as a consequence. Emma now takes sixteen morphine-based pain-killers each day. She can only paint for a maximum of three hours each day; some days not at all.
Her crash into the bleak void of continual pain compelled the twelve year old to express that anger and hurt therapeutically. Painting it not only brought about psychological relief but also exorcised demons. Her solitary path as an artist had begun. And due to her disability she has remained outside of the established realm of art education, with the result that her vision is unique and true to herself.
To begin with, she emulated Dali and discovered William Blake, but now the only other artist she feels any strong affinity with is Georgia O'Keefe. O'Keefe's erotic forms are echoed in Scott-Smith's figurative landscapes but the younger artist's flowers are her own. They are either hot pools of pleasure or soft sculptures edged with sharp daggers.
Emma Scott-Smith's central figures are always nude females, their nakedness revealing raw, contorted muscle-tone and pain. Butterflies often inhabit their domains. Symbols of a free spirit from a land of tranquility. As they flit and hover, they metamorphose into birds, raptors - preying upon vulnerability - menacing - harrying.
Emma Scott-Smith painstakingly decorates her fingernails. This ornate body art mimics the mosaic brilliance of a butterfly's wing as well as perhaps symbolising something that her paintings fail to reach. An outward projection of her need to be recognised beyond the kitchen table.
Marshall Anderson
September 1997