Rychèl Thérin Scott
Rychèl Thérin Scott is an artist, curator and researcher of Māori (Ngati Porou) and Jèrriaise descent, working with installation, assemblage and lens based media to explore themes of genealogy, diaspora, mana wāhine, intersectional feminism, decolonial methodologies, practices of care and place making.
Thérin Scott (Ngāti Porou) grew up between Aotearoa New Zealand and Jersey, C.I. She currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria; and is married (⚭ 2009) with two children (b. 2009 & 2013). She holds a BFA (UAL Camberwell) a Masters in Māori Visual Arts (Massey University), is a qualified adult educator, and passed her German B2 ÖSD exam in 2020. She is currently studying towards a Masters in Art and Critical Studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna.
“(...) I position myself and my work Ka mua, Ka muri - walking backwards into the future, informed by the past.”
Ko Rychèl Thérin Scott ahau, Ko Ngati Porou te iwi, ko Mihikoinga te Marae, ko Taharora te whare, ko au he mokopuna nā Riwai Pakerau, Mere Nohoaka me Tukino Wharepapa.
I’m also from a tiny island called Jersey in the British Channel. A lot of people know of it as a tax haven. People often don’t know that the island has its own people, language and traditions; it produces the best potatoes, milk and seafood; and it is not a part of the UK, rather has been a self governing crown dependancy since 1204. My dad grew up speaking Jèrriais, and didn’t learn English until he went to school. Both my father in Jersey, and my Māori mum in Aotearoa were beaten for speaking their mother tongues at their school desks and in the playground.
Whakapapa - geneology, and whakawhanaungatanga - being in good relation with one another, grounds and centres the ways I move in through the world. Coming down through generations of artists, crafts people and agricultural smallholders, I position myself and my work Ka mua, Ka muri - walking backwards into the future, informed by the past. In doing this I’m bringing my own cultural specificity into cultivating and maintaining new relationships within foreign landscapes.
Collaborative art projects in Jersey and Vienna in 2022 led to me founding Women’s Research Wānanga in 2023, an umbrella arts research project delivering personal and professional development opportunities for independent artists investigating the female experience: feminine ways of doing and being, feminine bases of knowledge and critical engagement. My practice holds wānanga methodologies at the core (Mahuika & Mahuika, 2020); investing time in forging familial relationships with the people I work with in order to bring empathy, integrity and trust into our working / sharing / making / thinking spaces.
My research, writing, and artwork and curatorial practice explores the intersections between Indigenous knowledges and Western power structures, drawing on my lived experience as an Indigenous woman and mother in Europe.
My artistic practice is rooted in storytelling and comes together with collage - playing with video, photography, sculpture and painting, where art is imitating life, collaging all these random pieces of places and history and people and objects together to make a whole.
