Podcast with Iris Scott

Get to know Iris:

Iris Scott is an American contemporary painter working in the Instinctualist style. Instinctualism is 40,000 years old, making it the oldest school of human mark-making, with thematics founded in animal imagery and mystical experience. 

Iris grew up in Maple Valley, Washington on what she describes as a “one-family hippie commune”. Iris and her sister spent evenings listening to their mother, a writer, tell epic tales about the anthropomorphized lives of the family’s pet parrots, lizards, cats, goats, and rabbits—with wild roaming coyotes appearing in the stories as special guest stars. As a result of this deep connection with animals during her upbringing, the agon of Iris’s work is closing the distance between humans and nature. 

After studying in Florence, in the same centuries-old halls where Raphael, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci worked, Iris moved to a tiny apartment overlooking a rainforest outside of Kaohsiung, Taiwan; from there she launched her career. Her artistic journey took her from Taiwan, to Seattle, and then to Brooklyn, New York, where she lived and worked in a loft space of a former mattress factory. During the six-year-long NYC period, Iris began a relationship with the cutting-edge Filo Sofi Arts Gallery. Her 2019 solo show, Ritual in Pairing, held in Chelsea, was attended by Jerry Saltz and received coverage from outlets like New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, and Artnet. On the West coast, Iris is represented by Adelman Contemporary. 

The successes of New York (and living on “the nosiest street in America”) led Iris, in 2020, to seek isolation and solitude in New Mexico, overlooking Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe’s old stomping grounds. She has built a house and studio adjacent to national wilderness and currently lives within walking distance of caves, dinosaur bones, native ruins, and petroglyphs. Here, Iris is connecting to the Instinctualist impulses of the earliest human artists. 

In Spring 2022, Iris will unveil a new body of work, and a new technique at Filo Sofi Arts. The fresh collection shall depict the desert otherworld of Northern New Mexico—the stark landscape, occupied by resilient plants that twist and claw their way around the rocks, adamant on survival. Her life’s goal is to transcend Industrialism’s cultish trend of separation from nature, and depict a new mythos of the oldest truth: we are all one.

www.irisscottfineart.com