About
Marcia Scott is a Brazilian-born artist based in St Kilda, Melbourne. She works in ink and watercolour, building botanical forms from layered washes and fine, rhythmic line — flowers and leaves that tip over into pattern.
Every work is a unique original on 300 gsm 100% cotton hot-pressed paper, painted with Winsor & Newton watercolours and Posca acrylic pens, and comes with a signed certificate of authenticity.
Work in progress
Naturalised
Naturalised is a nine-panel ink and watercolour work Marcia is developing about the plants migrant women carried to Melbourne: cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper, seeds in an envelope, a fig, an olive or a curry leaf brought past a customs desk. Melbourne's backyards are a record of who arrived and when.
Each panel is painted according to what became of that species in Australian soil. A plant that thrived spreads past the edge of the sheet. One later declared a weed is painted with the containment its status implies. One that never took is left incomplete. The title holds both meanings of the word: becoming a citizen, and a plant taking hold in new ground.
Marcia came to Australia from Brazil, which is why this work is hers to make. Her paintings sit between botanical illustration and abstraction and belong to neither. These are plants kept by women: seeds saved, cuttings struck, herbs grown by the back door. The domestic garden is where this history is held, and it has almost never been the subject of serious painting. One question drives the work, and she does not yet know the answer: how does a painting depict a plant that did not survive?