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Originally from South Africa, Nanci Price Scoular is a Canadian/American mixed media artist and creative coach. Her journey of immigration and transformation has had a profound effect on her life and her art. Price Scoular works both on canvas and paper, combining acrylic paint with her own original photography.
Price Scoular has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay Area and more recently in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been selected for juried exhibitions by a number of prestigious arts professionals, including curators Karen Tsujimoto, Alison Gass, Philip Linhares, Kenneth Baker and Lynn Orr. Her Urban Still Life series caught the attention of art critic DeWitt Cheng. He wrote that “(they) suggest ambiguity and change, but with paradoxical visual authority,” comparing her work to that of Lionel Feininger and J.M.W. Turner. In 2010, Price Scoular was artist-in-residence at the Morris Graves Foundation (Loleta, CA)
Price Scoular completed an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Artist Statement
Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home. I embark on a voyage of seeing. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes
Many of us are migrants, whether we have relocated states or journeyed across oceans. In our minds and bodies we carry traces of the special places we left behind – emotional and physical remnants of ‘home’ that we thread in and out of new identities we weave for ourselves.
The sea has always felt like home to me, and the oceans an essential life force, connecting the coast of California where I now live, the tip of Africa where I was born and the Irish land of my ancestors. I explore the multiple realities of myself through my art, working in several mediums - painting, monotypes and photography - often combining two or all three simultaneously. I relish both the element of surprise and the challenge of mixed media. Additionally, the process aligns snugly with my exploration of differing realities.
I also engage in installation work as a method of enquiry, with those I have created to-date existing somewhere between painting and sculpture - not quite one or the other but both, and…