The Artifacts of Being Human

Stott attended the California Institute of the Arts and completed her degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, specializing in painting. After returning to Charlotte, she became one of the founding collective members of Goodyear Arts, a multidisciplinary artist collective. She quickly built a community of admirers and fellow makers who were curious to see where her portals would take them.

Family history has long been a subject in Stott’s work, from thrilling stories of escaping the Mexican Revolution by train to ancestors accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. These narratives even merge with images of her own children, who appear as cherub-cheeked angels and metamorphosed butterflies. This magical feeling that every aspect of Stott’s life could unfold into an adventure story leads her to create art from the details of her life—from the most mundane to the most precious—as if she were illustrating a storybook.

Following in the Pop Art tradition of artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Rosalyn Drexler, Stott is drawn to everyday objects not only for how they look, but also for how they make her feel. Stott explains:

“I’m a really messy person and very disorganized and I have a lot of personal shame around not being put together. A whole part of the practice is trying to accept something about myself that I have a hard time with. It can be kind of beautiful, too, the artifacts of being a human. The humanness everywhere when we leave things behind. Or it’s stuff that I really love. It’s kind of a mix of those two things.”