Scott will include one of her father's two framed print portraits with charred edges in her exhibition, Out of the Illusion, Into the Unified Field, this month. The portrait is dominated by a blue-faced profile with a third eye in an amorphous space-helmet. Shamanic dots, or seeds, scatter across the celestial atmosphere. There are floating eyes, a portal and the suggestion of an event horizon.
Even though the two artists never knew each other, the surrealistic, arcane symbology in her father's self-portraits have much in common with those in Scott's own work. The other-worldly style she paints in plumbs an idiosyncratic cosmogony via a multi-dimensional world-view unrecognisable to most.
Monocular tentacles, and a querulous Tea Pot Head proliferate as recurrent motifs in much of her work. The motifs are the denizens of a liminal New Zealand landscape at the boundary of consciousness.
“My exhibition has hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes in it,” Scott says.
“The eyes represent the cosmos. I believe we are in a fishbowl, and the surrounding plasma unified field is all-knowing, all-seeing. We are parts of the whole, experiencing life subjectively, and the screen is our eyes that feed back into the unified field.
“The eyes are the decoder. They also represent benevolent star beings who are unseen in this dimension but see all.”
The unified field is essentially the infinite spirit, universal being.
“The unified field is where everything is connected. The inversion is high-rise towers that separate us from earth's electromagnetic field and chemical poisons — anything that is not in a symbiotic relationship with mother Earth.”
Some might find Scott's belief system challenging, but her late father seems to have shared a similar vision.
The Wairoa artist had long sought the father she never knew but only learned of his whereabouts after police informed her of his death.
Unable to identify Alan James Scott, 68, deceased at 1.20am on June 3, 2015, because she had never met him, Scott visited the place where he spent his last hours on Earth. She arrived at the bed and breakfast she had booked at night and planned to locate the warehouse the following day.
“In the morning I got up early and stepped on to the deck. Right opposite the bed and breakfast was this building with a big window or door that had been blown out. I knew this was the place.”
The main road frontage was sealed off with police tape. Scott stepped off the deck and passed through the blackened hole at the back of the burned-out warehouse.
Along with the self-portraits and shreds of writing, Scott also found a scrap of torn, charred paper in the ashes that featured an image of an alien spaceship hovering above the dried, cracked surface of a dead planet — Earth, presumably — as spectral figures float from the ground to the ship.
Scott preserved the fragment and later incorporated the image in one of her journey works.
These large mandala-like pieces are essentially the story of the artist's life. The original journey work continues to expand as Scott develops it.
Forms and figures, the plethora of vine-like, monocular tentacles, eyes, faces, and Boschian creatures, and Tea Pot Head, from the journey paintings proliferate throughout the retrospective and new works that comprise her upcoming exhibition.
Out of the Illusion, Into the Unified Field is also a journey through Scott's evolution as an artist from her lyrical abstraction beginnings and trajectory into a more surrealistic, visionary vein.
Scott's cosmogonic view was greatly influenced by Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner's 1918 lecture, The Work of the Angels In Man's Astral Body, that she read at an early age.
Development of the spiritual soul has been in progress since the 15th century, says Steiner in a transcript of the lecture.
“This is a factor in the evolution of humanity which essentially concerns our own times. The paramount force in human evolution from the 15th century until the beginning of the fourth millennium is the spiritual Soul.
“Steiner talked about the web that wraps around the globe and separates us from the unified field,” Scott says.
“That's the internet. The internet separates us from our source.
“The internet is a bad copy of the unified field and functions through technology rather than spirit, the organic plasma-frequency source energy of which we are and is all around us but are unable to see as most are still in infant stages of perception.”
The energy Scott saw in the works of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock's loosely named “drip paintings” was another significant influence.
The raw energy in the selection of Scott's striking monochrome pieces though, recalls the inchoate, primordial forms in abstract expressionist, and Pollock rival, Willem de Kooning's painting, Excavation.
Scott's monochromes are made up of forms in flux that suggest eyes, teeth, bony casements halfway to skull formation except for an innate propensity for dissolution into the undifferentiated stuff they barely evolved from.
“When I was doing the monochromes I couldn't see the whole picture of where I wanted to be. That was the beginning of finding the language I wanted. I used to work in six styles but narrowed it down to three and sculpture.”
Scott is nothing if not eclectic. After three years of study in art and design at the Eastern Institute of Technology, she won the national Polymax Gold award in the mid-2000s, for black and white photography and darkroom skills.
She also won the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education's Seaweek sculpture competition judged by designer David Trubridge, and was selected by Damien Skinner and Gretchen Albrecht as a finalist in the Hawke's Bay Art Review Exhibition and Awards.
In her painting, she developed her style from lyrical abstraction, a trend similar to abstract expressionism, to the more surrealistic vein that lends itself to her empyrean view.
“Everything I do is interrelated,” Scott says.
“Food, visuals, garden — it's all creative and intertwined with all the senses and divine, lush taste, scent and visuals.
“I'm creating an Alice in Wonderland, a puzzle, like my works.”
Out of the Illusion, Into the Unified Field, an exhibition of paintings by Tish Scott, opens at Tairawhiti Museum on Friday, December 16, 5.30pm.
