I am an interdisciplinary artist living in Perth, Western Australia. I have a Master of Business (Arts and Culture) (2005) from the University of South Australia and a PhD in social science (2013) from Curtin University, Western Australia. Previously, I had my own design label Pearl’s by Joy, creating bespoke silk lingerie in Dubai and later Perth. Following this I ran a community art gallery and recreational arts facility. As an independent art manager, I have initiated and managed fine art exchange exhibitions and artist residencies between Perth and China. For a few years I lived in Shanghai, where I taught arts management and business communications to undergraduate and post graduate students. Arriving back in Perth in 2008, I commenced my doctorate, an auto-ethnographic arts-based research enquiry, interrogating my life experiences as an academic living and working in Shanghai.
My arts practice encompasses embroidery, fabric manipulation, poetry, and arts project management. Since 2016, I have been designing and facilitating community arts programs for migrant communities. In particular, migrant women from Non-English and English speaking backgrounds who are interested in exploring their creativity and sense of personal and cultural identity through design and stitch.
In my own work, I draw on stitch and words to describe emotional responses, and their trigger effects on lived experience. As a sexagenarian woman I am exploring the question as to where am I in the scheme of things?
As an embroiderer I am self-taught. Yet, my passion for stitch is lifelong reaching back to early childhood. As a way of articulating my thoughts, I began utilising stitch as an art form at the beginning of 2019. During this time, I have been drawn towards stitching intricately complex embroidered surfaces using wrapping and seed stitches to create a tactile language response to my poetry. Consequently, there is a strong tendency in my work towards the autobiographical, embedded in personal experiences and entangled relational spaces, where social, cultural, and gendered differences intersect.
In its broadest sense, my work practice in all its aspects, takes its cue from feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed, as to how our feelings are wrapped up with how we co-exist with others and why it matters. The emotional, the body, the relational and matters of soul—all manifest consciously or not through my needle and thread traversing feeling landscapes constructed from cloth and fibre.
I can be contacted via e-mail on:
joy.scott@iinet.net.au
MEDIA
Articles and other print material:
Exuberance: An Embroiderer’s Perspective by Carol Cooke, 2023 (book).
Innovation arising in the West: Twentyfjve+crossover exhibition. A survey of contemporary fibre and textiles in Western Australia. Textile Art Forum Magazine #150 June 2023
Artist Profile: Joy Denise Scott. Embellish: The Australian Magazine for Textile Arts. Issue 54. 2023.
The poetry of stitch, interview with Mary Carson for TextileArtist.Org: December 2022.
https://www.textileartist.org/joy-denise-scott-the-poetry-of-stitch
Artist Talk:
WAFTA twentyFIVE+ crossover exhibition, October 2022.