Converse/Dazed Emerging Artists Award: Samara Scott

The Converse/Dazed Emerging Artists Award 2012's judging panel – Jeremy Deller, Kirsty Ogg, Yuri Pattison, Magnus Edensvard, Nancy Durrant and Francesca Gavin – has whittled the entrants down to the final four, and now have the difficult task on choosing a winner.

I’m pretty apathetic about stoic historical materials like bronze; rather, I like the tempo of things that are more fragile and fractured with real life – the suppleness of body gel, toilet paper, sponge, carpet samples. Urban spirituality

Dazed has been finding out more about each of the shortlisted artists ahead of their joint exhibition next month, which is taking place at a Whitechapel Gallery-attached space in east London's Osborn Street.

Up this week: Samara Scott. This installation artist and Royal College of Art MA graduate has exhibited internationally, as well as having her work shown online on platforms such as Bubblebyte.org and Sleeping Upright. She also built sets and costume for LuckyPDF TV at Frieze. For Scott, it is not just a case of digital versus material, but how the two affect each other...

Dazed Digital: Why did you decide to enter the competition?
Samara Scott: You just need money to keep making!

DD: How does your work differ? What makes it new?
Samara Scott: Well, it shifts away in some ways from this wave of internet art because it's absolutely about stuff – more about a materiality saturated by a sort of virtuality, and washed-up real things. So the spaces I make might appear to mimic post-internet environments, but they are manifested – real – fingered – and suggestive of digital clutter and overload: icons, pop-up banners, irritations, ripples, sporadic thoughts, patchy logic etc. So, a bounciness, where things slip off screens and get translated into material spellings. I am interested in similar kinds of questions about how technology has changed our relationship with our environments, and I approach this with the language of the materials I use. I’m pretty apathetic about stoic historical materials like bronze; rather, I like the tempo of things that are more fragile and fractured with real life – the suppleness of body gel, toilet paper, sponge, carpet samples. Urban spirituality!

I’m interested too in the lack of clarity about the multitude of things an object can be nowadays... The infinite possibilities of suggestion. An all of this I’m not sure if I’m doing anything new at all – I’m excited and anxious like many of us about these flooding overlaps between things and the artifice that’s possible these days, and I simply work in a pop style, reusing images, symbols, colour schemes, paint effects. My work is a smashed-together collage of things I see – I just hope it's timely.

DD: Should you win the prize, what do you plan to do with the money?
Samara Scott: Take the time for a chapter of research – I want to go on a Mediterranean cruise to make a short film. I've been assembling it in my head for a long while and writing an script, but never had the funds to act on it.

DD: Can you talk us through the work you'll be producing for the show at Osborn Street?
Samara Scott: I work lots of ideas through at the same time in the studio – a lot of decisions get made when it gets real in the space.

Film by Romano Pizzichini

More info on the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artists Award HERE