Nina Scott-Hansen
Nina Scott-Hansen moved to the United States from Denmark with her family when she was 10 years old. She studied art at institutions in Norway and the United States and worked in advertising before embarking on a full-time career in art. She has shown at many galleries, including Drawing Room Gallery in St. George, Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Filament Gallery in Portland, Harbor Square Gallery in Rockland, and Lanning Gallery in Sedona, Arizona. Scott-Hansen’s work has also been shown in Norway, at Smestad Gallery and Kjell Olsen Kunst Gallery.
Scott-Hansen’s late boyfriend, an ironworker, taught her to weld in the 1980s. She met him while she was working in advertising in Camden. “I fell for it right away,” she says, citing the visceral qualities of the material and the work as particularly engaging. “I like the heat, the way it smells, and the way it feels.” Scott-Hansen has sculpted horses, trolls, and myriad creatures, but she is most known for her quirky, witty, and slightly macabre birds. “It’s my signature,” she says. To create these singular beings, Scott-Hansen begins with the feathers: she draws them on a flat piece of sheet metal, cuts them out with a torch, and then uses an anvil to form them. The body is composed of a “cage,” to which she affixes the head and beak. Finally, Scott-Hansen welds the feathers onto the body, which she notes is a difficult process. Sometimes the feathers don’t lie right, so a bit of trial and error is required. But, “it is fun to see them evolve,” says Scott-Hansen. “I like the activity of welding. I’ve never considered it work.”
Her choice of subjects is just as natural as her aptitude for welding. “I’ve always loved all living things,” says Scott- Hansen. “That’s the thing that really shows in my work.” Her knack for capturing the personality of various creatures is uncanny. Hans is just one example from Scott-Hansen’s metal menagerie. “The birds have such a presence,” she says. “They’re all different.” Hans’s pointed beak emerges playfully from a mass of twisted feathers, and his abnormally large feet look like pitchforks, long and spindly. The sculpture has such a tactile quality that one wants to reach out and touch it; the rich texture of the feathers suggests a liveliness not expected from such a tough material. Scott-Hansen’s work revels in this interplay of contrasts. She enjoys that so many people gravitate to her work and notes that it has a “friendly” quality, in that “my stuff is not intellectual. It’s not asking for any deep thought.” Art does not have to be analyzed to be appreciated.