The Weight of Small Things (part one)

I’ve written about artists for years, always from the familiar vantage points of curator, maker, and occasionally from a therapeutic perspective. But rarely do I encounter work that touches all three of those identities at once. When I first came across this artist’s work online, I was drawn to the intriguing images.

It wasn’t until Scott walked into the gallery, carrying the analog originals; the scraps, the recycled paper, the spills, the fragments of his days, that something inside me shifted. As someone who works with analog processes in art therapy, I recognized it instantly. This wasn’t just a technique. It was evidence.

Evidence that art as therapy is real. Evidence that it works. Evidence that what begins as release can become a catalyst, and then, remarkably, a fully resolved piece of art that feels positive, relatable, and deeply human.

Scott’s work lives in this rare intersection: the therapeutic act, the intuitive process, and the final, refined image. This exhibition, The Weight of Small Things, is built from that intersection.

I first found Scott’s work the way so many of us find things now, quietly, on a screen. His images had a softness to them, a sense of atmosphere, like something was humming underneath the surface. They stayed with me. So I reached out, and we began talking.

When he walked into the gallery for the first time, he brought a stack of finished prints, the same kind of work I had admired online. One by one, they were even more intriguing in person. There was a depth in the color shifts, an odd luminosity in the lines, a feeling that the work was holding something I couldn’t yet name.

We talked easily and naturally. He mentioned scanning “his originals,” but in such a small, passing way that it felt more like stating a simple fact than revealing something important. I didn’t yet understand what an “original” meant to him.

What I did understand was that something in this work asked me to slow down, to look a little longer, to listen differently.

I didn’t know then that this was only the surface, the finished layer of a much deeper process.

That would come next.

More soon.

** Next: “The raw analog pages.

Scraps and spills. Torn photos. Fruit stickers. Bits of paper and ash.

He saw them as the messy beginning. I saw them as something more.”