A silversmith whose work is inspired by Pictish carvings in the north-east has been named as a winner of Scotland’s biggest development award for craft.
Scott Smith (27), who is from near Portsoy, was presented with the Inches Carr Craft Development Award presented by Visual Art Scotland (VAS), receiving £7000.
VAS received hundreds of applications for the awards each of which comprises a bursary of £5000 and a further £2000 for mentoring, amounts VAS president Tavienne Bridgwater described as “life-changing”.
The winners were revealed at the opening of an exhibition by the nine shortlisted artists, One From the Cutting Room Floor, at the Custom Lane Gallery in Leith, which runs until September 29.
The show features work as diverse as bookbinding, sculpted wooden furniture and hand-built ceramics.
Scott, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art who is now based in Aberdeen, makes functional and decorative silver vessels inspired by the carvings on Pictish standing stones in his native Aberdeenshire.
He said: “I’m really passionate about the north-east and its heritage. The Pictish stones in Aberdeenshire are not as well known as the ones at some other sites.
“My dad is a farmer near Portsoy, and I also want to capture the rhythms of people who work the land in the things I make.
“I want to use the bursary to learn how to make my own tools so I can capture the texture of the Pictish stones in silver, and use the mentoring to develop my craft business in a sustainable way.”
Textile artist Erin McQuarrie, from Glasgow, who studied printed textiles at Glasgow School of Art before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York, was the other recipient of the award. She will use the bursary to buy a floor loom which will enable her to work on a bigger scale.
VAS president Tavienne Bridgwater said: “We had planned to give one award this year and one next year, however, when we saw the quality of the shortlist, we decided to give two awards this year.
“It’s unusual for an artist to be offered £7000 without restrictions. It is potentially life-changing. We didn’t set parameters, we just invited makers to tell us what they wanted to do, and present evidence for how they would do that.
“There is a huge amount of talent on the shortlist and in our membership, so there were some difficult decisions.
“Erin and Scott pitched their ideas in terms of the next 10 years of their practice. This is an investment in each of them at a critical juncture to enable them to sustain their work as artists and makers.
“They are both carving out their own unique space in the world of craft, finding their own voices and pushing the boundaries of what they do.”
VAS is one of the largest artist-run organisations in Scotland, with a membership of more than 1200 artists and makers.
The VAS team sifted through hundreds of applications for the Inches Carr Craft Development Awards before presenting an exhibition by a longlist of 16 artists at the Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh, in July.
The shortlist of nine then presented their work at Dalkeith Palace in August in a series of micro-exhibitions.
The Inches Carr Bursary is a legacy of the Inches Carr Trust, set up in memory of craft enthusiasts Deirdre Inches and Malcolm Carr, which was wound up in 2022. VAS became the custodian of part of the legacy, of which these are the final two awards.
