Studio Baxter is the creative workshop of Scott Baxter, an experimental silkscreen and lithographic printmaker based in Edinburgh. Scott came to printmaking late in life, as after school he trained as an architect at the Glasgow School of Art and went on to work in Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, and Ireland. However, in 2011, he decided to return to art school and studied Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art. Intermedia incorporates photography, video, performance, and text, and investigates new ways to understand and create art. Scott tells us; “The course gave me the tools to examine all forms of art making through a conceptual basis. At college, I briefly experimented with etching and relief printing and at my degree show I incorporated a large interactive screen-printed panel as part of an installation.”
After college, Scott was encouraged by his peers to return to printmaking to further develop his practice. But it wasn’t until 2020 that he undertook a silkscreen printing course at Edinburgh Printmakers (EP). He states; “As a member of EP I have found creative home to develop my practice with incredible support from the other printmakers and technicians there”.
In 2022 Scott received a Visual Arts Award from Creative Scotland which allowed him to undertake a course in photo-plate lithography at EP, which he continues to utilise alongside his screenprinting work. The experience of working in photo-plate lithography has allowed Scott to explore traditional CMYK colour separation methods. “Although not a necessary part of the process, I discovered it to be a method that allowed me to introduce my photographic practice to my printmaking work,” says the printmaker. Subsequently, he has brought CMYK into his screenprinting practice and has created a series of half-tone works. This concept has also led him to explore laser etching over screen-printed ply panels.
Scott’s practice examines evolving LGBT+ identities and imagery where digital technologies have become part of everyday identity creation and archiving. His work also responds to historical queer invisibility by subverting our understandings of common social allegories to generate new contexts for queer agency to exist across open-ended visual narratives.
Many of the works he produces start as a collaborative process with a model, usually a friend or someone in the LGBT+ community, followed by a photoshoot. Scott comments; “Often, I can go into a shoot expecting to make a certain work, but things can go off in a tangent; the model will bring unexpected props or ideas that we end up pursuing. Therefore, identifying what the work is can take time after the shoot before I’m able to produce printed work.”
Currently, Scott is researching forms of portraiture and narrative with queer themes: materials, body types, and gender performativity. He is also looking at alternate surfaces and materials, such as steel, plywood, and mirror, suggesting symbolism in the images he creates, rather than defaulting to paper as a base.
www.scottbaxterartist.org
@studio_baxter_edi
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