If you drive out Old Las Vegas Highway toward the solitary area between Eldorado and Lamy, not only is the experience a little more pleasant than the slapdash vibes of the freeway, you can spend some time considering how many artists and studios dot the landscape just outside town. Santa Fe and the surrounding region obviously have plenty of art history going all over the place, but somehow the artist population out that way is weirdly high.
Over the years I’ve conducted scads of interviews out near and beyond Eldorado, and I think it might have something to do with the borderline silence in certain areas—it’s the type of place where you can feel alone with the wind and your thoughts and get down to the work. One such artist who calls the area home is Ellie Beth Scott, a native of Ohio who spent time in Boston and San Francisco for art school, but ultimately fell in love with Santa Fe in the early-’90s and, after decades of regular visits, made the move to town permanently in 2009.
“Oh, I’ve been coming here for 35 years,” Scott tells SFR. “I just love the multicultural dynamic and creative energy of a small town. You have to be fiercely independent and you have to have your own passion, though.”
Scott began as a painter, she says, in the ’80s.
“When I was in school, you painted with oil paints,” she recalls, “but eventually I started working with and dyeing my own textiles, almost like a Rohrsharch test. I’d look at the splatterings as they emerged from the vat and started painting whatever I saw in the matrix.”
It wasn’t easy, though.
Courtesy Ellie Beth Scott
“I had a lot of older, male professors who didn’t see women in the 1980s acquiring a platform,” Scott tells SFR. “But I was determined not to be the percentage of artists who weren’t making art after five years of post-grad school.”
Scott had what she calls “a false hope start,” at her first-ever show by selling two pieces for $650—a king’s ransom, it felt, at the time. And though the following years certainly wouldn’t be a cavalcade of riches spurred by a constant stream of collectors, Scott did slowly but surely begin to hone her style into what it is today. She describes her practice and pieces as “visual poems,” and her process of melding textiles with painting continues—now, however, she also makes use of a self-taught hand-stitching technique. Think of a Scott piece a bit like a quilt or tapestry, only their size and shape preclude them from joining your bedspread accoutrements. Each piece tells a story (what that is might be up to the beholder), but the over-arching tale is one of an artist who goes into painstaking detail by hand.
“My work morphed because I could take my hand stitching anyplace,” Scott explains. “A lot of women’s work in stitching came in moments they could steal, but I wanted it to be more than needle work. I wanted it to be strong and symbolic.”
Of course, the very nature of quilts-as-art brings up a sort of paradoxical conundrum that might best be described in the ways we consider craft as opposed to art. Pieces like vessels, tools and blankets somehow get relegated to the land where capital-A Art Lovers fear to tread—unless, of course, they’re very old. Often, as viewers, we discount artists and their practice if they wind up with pieces that serve a utilitarian function. How silly. As for whether Scott’s pieces are so-called “good,” well, that depends. To hear the artist tell it, the goal is to subtly suggest that life is for the living, and there’s an underlying current of self-sufficiency inherent in the art world, particularly for a creator more interested in expression than commercialism.
“I kind of think of my work as…we all come through our lives with a variety of experiences,” Scott says. “Some come through stronger, or not, but it’s a personal narrative that is very much attached to a universal solace—that’s the beauty of it; we’re not confined to being emotional or non-emotional with art, even if we often tamp down or relegate our emotions.”
So what does she call herself?
“I consider myself an artist and craftsperson, and I very much respect technique, and also cultural stories,” she says. “Craft is…think of baseball cards, where you have these factory-made cardboard things printed with cheap ink, and people will spend how much collecting them? Then you have quilts that took how many hundreds of hours of hand work?”
A fair point. Like all art, pieces will be worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But take the money of it all out of the equation, Scott says, and ask what speaks directly to you. It need not be one of hers (though you’ll have a chance to check out her newest pieces at the Vital Spaces Midtown Annex this weekend).
“I believe in perpetuating using our hands to express ourselves, no matter what level we’re at,” she says. “And there’s a mental health component, and I’m an advocate for creative expression being good mental health. I believe in almost scrapbooking that experience of life we all have within ourselves.”
Ellie Beth Scott:
Visual Poems Opening:
4-7 pm Friday, March 7. Free
Ellie Beth Scott Discussion
& Sewing Circle:
11 am-1 pm Saturday, March 8. Free
Vital Spaces Midtown Annex
1600 St. Michael’s Drive, vitalspaces.org
