Samara Scott’s liquid paintings at Battersea Park
In the summer of 2016, British artist Samara Scott unveiled an exhibition at the Pump House Gallery and Pleasure Garden Fountains at Battersea Park. Called Developer, the site-specific exhibition filled two ponds with, to use Scott’s words, “a Matisse-y tapestry of building site materials: Tarpaulin, chrome and bitumen paint, scaffold netting and damp proof membrane.” She refers to them as ‘liquid paintings’.
The colour dyes and industrial materials used harked back to the area’s long gone chemical, textile and fabric industries. The title Developer alludes to the traditional process of developing photos using chemicals and water. The ponds are both beautiful and ugly at the same time; they are reminiscent of the dumped man-made waste we see all around us in rivers and seas, yet the moving colours and textures create wonderful, mysterious shapes of a secret world underwater.