Artist: Margaret Scott
Title: STATS
Attribution: STATS, Maggie Scott, 2021
Year: 2021
Materials: Nuno Felted Merino Wool on Silk
Dimensions: 170cm x 120cm
Image Statement: The success of the social justice movements of the 1960s drove scholars in a range of disciplines to increase efforts to understand human inequalities. Over the last sixty years researchers have created a constantly growing library of data which provides empirical evidence of inequalities between groups. Whilst such research is necessary in the pursuit of a more equitable society, it also reduces groups of people to figures on a page, all but removing the people they represent. With STATS Maggie Scott has depicted the ghost-like silhouettes of two women whose faces have been drained of colour and are mostly obscured by large and ostensibly meaningless numbers. STATs sits within a body of work that seeks to illustrate the abstract numbers of the MRBACE UK Perinatal Mortality report with the faces of healthy young women, addressing the need to humanise people who are the subject of such reports explicitly.