Diane Scott display at Heritage House

Artist Diane Scott (left) and Heritage House Supervisor
Chevala Burke. 

Diane Scott and her button collage

Cow-horns made pretty 

Artwork from conch shells

Friday,  October 14, 2005

This week’s featured artist at the Heritage House, Diane Scott started doing art when she was just a child.

“When I was a little girl, I used to be sickly,” she recalled.

“I had typhoid and whooping cough, so I used to occupy myself with collecting things and watching the birds and plants.”

She used to study herbal medicine, though she was not interested in learning things at school. She did, however, like poetry.

Like all little girls at the time, Ms Scott used to make dolls from Tamarind pods, which were used as a body, and coconut rods for the arms and legs.

“Craftwork then was not thought of as art – it was just something to do,” she said.

Ms Scott said she took up art and craftwork again when she was married with young children. When the kids were sleeping, she was bored, she said.

Ms Scott is also known on the Brac as a collector of all sorts of things, such as stamps, coins, belt buckles, buttons, and some of her collections will be displayed in a separate exhibit later on.

However, in this exhibit, she has used items from her collection to make some of the pieces on display. For example, a cow-horn is covered with beads she has found and belt buckles and buttons go into creating collages.

District Administration Marketing and Promotions Manager Chevala Burke said she was very pleased with the way that the series of exhibitions at the Heritage House are going.

”We’ve ended up with a lot more visitors than I thought we would,” she said, noting that throughout September, there were over 85 visitors, both local and tourist, and twenty-nine for Diane Scott’s exhibit alone.

The single artist displays will continue up to the last week of November. They will be followed by the “Collections, Reflections and Christmas Exhibit”, which will run until the end of December.

In January the single artist displays will resume, and there are different artists booked until the end of April.

“The community is really embracing the idea. We’re having a lot of local artists step forward to display their talents. I knew we had a lot of artists, but I was surprised by the number.”

“Many do it on the side to occupy their time, but so many are very talented,” she said.

According to Ms Burke, the objective of the series is to display the talent of the artist and to encourage the community to embrace the heritage and culture, since a lot of the artwork is based on things done in yesteryear.

“Now we have some younger artists bringing new techniques to the Island,” she said.

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