We chat to Hannah Scott, winner of the Floating Circle Prize at the RWA 173rd Annual Open, about the extraordinary human body, the relationship between nature and technology, and her journey from medicine to art.…
“…“I had to break the bone to show how clever it is…”
Hannah Scott is the winner of the Floating Circle Prize for Best Work by an Emerging Artist at the RWA’s 173rd Annual Open. Her winning work, Titan, is a striking sculpture of an enormous, fractured human thigh bone, carved in alabaster and held in a steel traction frame.
Hannah is a former anaesthetist who left medicine to pursue a career in art. We spoke to her about Titan, the ideas behind her work and her experience of becoming an artist…
Congratulations on winning the Floating Circle Prize! How did it feel to have your work recognised in this way?
It felt absolutely brilliant. It still feels brilliant!
The evening was wonderful, and to have my work recognised by such a well-established institution, and to have my name on the list of artists that goes back 173 years, is just absolutely wonderful. I’m over the moon.
When did you first realise you were an artist?
I think I always knew that art was the most important thing in my life, but I had a moment of actually putting art down. At A-level, I did art and sciences and couldn’t decide between being an artist and being a doctor. Medicine was the one that held court for 18 or 19 years.
Then, when I was 40, I had a moment of reckoning. I was offered a job in medicine that would see me through the next 20 years, and I thought that if I didn’t give up medicine and go to art college now, I really wouldn’t ever do it.
So I gave up my career and went to art college quite late in life. Since then, I’ve been absolutely delighted and feel proud enough to call myself an artist.
The prize is for best work by an ‘emerging artist’. How do you see yourself within that category, and what stage do you feel your practice is at right now?
I definitely feel I’m an emerging artist, and I think it’s such an exciting thing to be.
I’ve spent the last few years grappling with what I really want to say, being quite experimental and all over the place, and chucking a huge amount of art in the bin.
Finally, at the end of my master’s at the Royal College of Art last year, I got to the point where I thought I’d found my voice. This is what I want to say. I’ve emerged!
Since then, I’ve been desperate to get all the ideas out of my head and make art. There’s an urgency about it because I have so much I want to say and so many things I want to make. I just can’t make it quickly enough.
There’s a real energy and excitement about being an emerging artist. I’m doing group shows with other emerging artists, and we’re all in it at the same time. You can have a lot of fun with it.
Can you tell us about the winning work, Tutan? What inspired it, and how did it develop?
My practice is based around the profundity of the human body, putting this in conversation with ideas of innovation, progress and technology, and the relationship between the two.
I drew inspiration from being a doctor and being lucky enough to look inside the human body for hours on end. I was drawn to how incredibly sophisticated and profound it is.
Once you get over the gore of seeing inside the human body, and once you’ve learnt all the anatomy, your mind is free to go to a place of amazement. There’s almost a sense of divinity in how evolved and incredible the body is.
People talk about doctors playing God, but if you look in an operating theatre, you realise that the only God in the room is the human body: its ability to heal, its ability to evolve, its ability to take these huge breaks and repair itself.
What we’re doing with all our cleverness is just tinkering around the edges, quite crudely at times.
In making Titan, I wanted other people to see what I see. Not the goriness of the human body, but its beauty and the amazement of it.
In order to show that, I had to break it to show how clever it is, and contrast it with this quite painful orthopaedic frame.
Titan brings together the organic beauty of alabaster and the industrial appearance of the metal traction frame. What interested you about putting these two materials together?
Marble has a particular place in art history, especially in classical art and the Renaissance, where it was used for idealised body forms, such as Michelangelo’s David. It’s also often used to depict gods and mythical, god-like creatures.
So it has this history of transcendence and divinity.
Alabaster is particularly special because it absorbs light. If you have natural light shining behind it, it looks as though it’s glowing in a beautiful, organic way.
I wanted the bone to look alive. Often, representations of anatomy in art are taken from dead bodies, because traditionally that has been the way people could see inside the body. But I didn’t want this work to have connotations of death or mortality. I wanted it to have connotations of life and vigour.
That’s why I chose the alabaster.
I also wanted to contrast the organic-looking stone with the steel of the orthopaedic frame, which looks quite painful and industrial.
The two materials are having a conversation with each other, reflecting on our relationship with innovation and how much we need it, but also how difficult and problematic that reliance can be.
I wanted the frame to look painful.
There’s something moving about the image of this enormous, almost superhuman bone being broken and supported. It suggests both strength and vulnerability, and the need for care. Was that part of what you wanted to explore?
Yes, definitely. There’s our own frailty and how we rely on technology to deal with it, and how that technology has achieved brilliant things.
But what I really wanted to show was that the power is in the bone itself and its ability to heal. I’ve positioned it so that the break looks as though it would eventually heal. It’s aligned correctly.
The bone’s ability to heal itself is essentially the miracle.
You previously worked as an anaesthetist. How has medicine shaped your artistic practice, beyond its direct influence on Titan?
Most of my work is about the human body because that’s my favourite subject.
I’ve explored its different dimensions, including consciousness, which is obviously something anaesthetics is concerned with because it’s about taking away people’s consciousness.
I draw on my own experiences, but I don’t want to be too didactic. With science and medicine in art, you can slip into the role of trying to explain processes to people, and I personally feel that then the art is slightly wasted.
Art should be so much more than scientific explanation. It shouldn’t simply illustrate what a bone looks like.
You need to find the poetry, the ways you want the audience to see the world and the inquiry you want them to consider.
Hopefully, you can get people to consider their own existence in a different way.
So I’m definitely very inspired by medicine, but I never want to use art simply as an explanation of medicine.
Which artists or makers have influenced or inspired you?
I have a long list on my phone of artists I’m currently looking at, which I’m constantly rearranging to remind myself to look at them again!
But if I were to choose one long-standing influence, it would be Louise Bourgeois.
I love the way she manages to make really big work but also maintain intimacy with the audience. She’s one of the few artists whose work makes people talk to each other in a gallery, even if they’ve never met before. I think that’s quite an amazing thing to achieve.
I’d love to create monumental work myself, but not simply for the sake of scale. What I’d really like to achieve is that combination of monumentality and intimacy, using scale to get a point across while keeping the work thoughtful.
Bourgeois is also very clever because her concepts are present visually. You don’t have to read a text to understand the conceptual resonance of her work. That’s very difficult to achieve.
Among the artists I’m looking at at the moment are Rosemarie Trockel, whose cross-disciplinary work brings science and literature into art, and Alexandra Bircken, who explores the human body and ideas of progress in a way that I feel is somewhat aligned with my own interests.
What are you working on now, or what’s next for you?
I’m currently working on a video piece exploring the definition of life.
I’m taking three classic artistic forms — the still life, the figure and the landscape — and making three short films, shot over different periods of time and then slowed down or sped up to seven minutes.
The work questions our definitions of life, what it means to exist and what it means to be.
For the still life, I’ve filmed a flower in a vase. It’s been picked, but the bud opens before it eventually wilts. That raises questions about how we define the end of life, which is more complicated than we might think.
Medical definitions have changed as we’ve developed technologies such as ventilators and other ways of sustaining life. It illustrates that our scientific knowledge and measurements aren’t necessarily as clear-cut as we think they are.
Perhaps life and existence are more than what we’ve discovered or what we currently consider them to be.
I’m someone without a fixed religious faith, and I’ve sometimes found conversations about the meaning of life and the end of life a little inaccessible because I don’t have that faith. This is a way for me to explore divinity and those difficult-to-reach subjects through science and definitions.
I’m also very interested in what happens when we reach the edges of scientific knowledge and have to start turning to philosophy because we haven’t been able to record or reach something. The idea that there might be an external component to consciousness, outside the human body, is fascinating to me.
Alongside the video piece, I’m working on more stone carvings and some drawings. They’re all part of this wider body of work exploring the edges of our knowledge, our reliance on technology and the human body, which, for me, includes consciousness.
Finally, what advice would you give to other emerging artists thinking about submitting to the RWA Annual Open?
Do submit! It’s just brilliant fun.
I’ve had such a good experience. On Varnishing Day, I met so many fantastic artists at all different stages of their careers, some really emerging and others very established and well known.
It’s a great melting pot of people coming together. Everyone has been so friendly and enthusiastic, and seeing your work in the exhibition is just brilliant.
Follow Hannah on Instagram @hannahscotstudio and her website hannahscottart.com
The RWA 173 Open continues until 3 January 2027.
