Extra Exhibition Text and Biography Writing
Ava Grauls & Frances Scott: Mapping Memory & Identity is a contemporary art exhibition uniting the cartographic paintings and installations of Ava Grauls with the photographs and maps of Frances Scott. This exhibition showcases artists using a geographic lens, specifically maps and close-up depictions of land, to explore or challenge how maps and landscapes shape identity, memory, and belonging. This exhibition strips the governing authority associated with cartography, and highlights the artists’ exploration of their own identities. Sub-themes in this exhibition include immigration, feminism, and environmentalism. The artists accomplish these themes by altering cartographic traditions–creating new abstract maps, made either through personal journeys on foot or tracing existing maps by hand. With two ethnographic and geographical perspectives, this exhibition unites different yet overlapping interpretations of memory and identity.
Grauls approaches mapping from a place of personal and public memory. Influenced by growing up in South Africa during the apartheid and her experience as an immigrant, her work depositions maps as an authoritative document and instead probes viewers to consider how maps and socio-political climates can shape perceptions of land and memory. By embedding an abstract state of beauty into her maps, she reclaims autonomy over her lived experiences–both over the international places she visits and her immigrant identity—and seeks to question what it means to truly belong.
Scott's work is rooted in Orkney, an archipelago near the north coast of Scotland. Her work details the changing relationship between an islander and her home, as she walks the brink where land meets sea. Through mapping and photography, she investigates the emotional and cultural imprint of land, revealing how ‘place’ can foster personal memory and identity. Her photographs paired with her maps investigate the malleable nature of belonging, and invite viewers to step into different worlds, spanning across varying distances and times. Like Grauls, she reclaims a sense of autonomy through her personal perception of the land, asserting where and how she belongs.
This show is attractive to diverse audiences, particularly those interested not only in abstract painting and photography, but also those intrigued by the contemporary legacies of mapmaking and increasing issues of border control and nationality. This exhibition is also compelling to artists and scholars interested in the storytelling of places with specific cultural and political histories and their landscapes’ relation to the earth.
Artist Biographies
Ava Grauls (born 1982) is a South African and Belgium painter and performer currently based in London, England. Her sculptural-like maps are politically and globally charged, yet they remain deeply personal to her experience as an immigrant. Her work navigates nationalized legitimacy, cultural legacy, and the environmental influences on identity through a geographic and feminist perspective. Her paintings also address international themes of statehood and identity.
Indeed, Grauls’ formative years were marked by significant geographical shifts. Born in South Africa during apartheid, she later moved to Belgium as a child, and subsequently relocated to a British asbestos mine in Eswatini. These experiences have profoundly shaped her practice, prompting her to question the forms of influence and education that manipulate public memory. Whether she is navigating her own experience migrating out of South Africa, or navigating new environments as an outsider–such as Hiroshima or Italy–Grauls’ paintings invites viewers to reflect on manipulated memory and displaced belonging.
Grauls achieved her MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Arts, a BA in Contemporary Art from the University of Dundee, and a BA in Film from the University of Westminster. In 2024, she received the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Grant to organize a group exhibition in Hiroshima, Japan, which aimed to explore diverse feminine perspectives on national identity. Grauls is also the recipient of the RSA David Michie Travel Award, John Milne, Moira McGregor Travel Bursary; among others. Grauls has also given lectures on national identity at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England.
Grauls’s paintings and films have been internationally exhibited including in London, Scotland, Lisbon, Hiroshima, and others. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Royal Scottish Academy.
Frances Scott (b. 1991) is a photographic artist and mapmaker from Orkney, Scotland. Her work seeks to contemplate the nature of belonging and how it can be reformed, offering a powerful testament to the emotional ties one may hold with a place and the evolving ways identity is shaped through that connection.
She began her practice by walking the entire coastline of Orkney’s mainland over the course of two years. She recorded this journey with a GPS-tracking device, hand-written observations and thoughts in her notebook, and a medium-format camera with black-and-white film. At the end of her coastal journey, Scott presented her photographs alongside her map, combined with her hand-written notes. Since then and for nearly a decade, Scott continues this process, aiming to walk Orkney’s approximately 70 islands. Throughout these journeys, Scott maintains two rules: walk as close to the edge as possible and only walk the path once. As she walks these routes, she logs her distance, the duration, her experiences, and discoveries. Images and writing from this ongoing series was published as a photobook by Another Place Press in 2020.
With a raw, powerful vulnerability tethered in her work, Scott’s practice allows her to forge a new relationship with the Orkney Islands as an adult, rediscovering a place that initially felt confining but is opened anew through her walks. Her black-and-white photographs, rich with texture and laced with emotion, paired with her maps that explore the slow beauty of her journeys, invites viewers into a layered world shaped by distance, time, and memory.
Scott earned her BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2014, receiving first-class honours and an award for her Critical Journal. She has been the recipient of multiple awards and residencies, including the 2024 Eynhallow Fulmar Study Artist in Residence at Aberdeen University, Scotland; the 2021 winner of the FLOW Photofest Commission, Scotland; and Creative Exchange Research Residency at the Stills Centre for Photography, Scotland in 2018; others. Scott is a founding member of the Orkney-based Moti Collective and has given multiple lectures at educational institutions throughout Scotland.
Her work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions at The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh; The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness; Island Darkroom, Isle of Lewis; Thurso Gallery, Thurso; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; and among others.