Gordon Scott

Gordon Scott was himself a conscientious objector during the Second World War, stationed at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain as a member of the Non-Combatant Corps. Though his designated role there was unknown, his sketches and paintings, made in the early 1940’s are portraits of fellow objectors who passed through the camp. Positioned within the military apparatus yet apart from it, Scott recorded these young men with a tenderness and precision, producing works that are as much works of art, as acts of witness to a significant period of history. To refuse to fight in that climate, was to hold onto something interior against enormous external pressure. Scott captures that refusal, and the men who embodied it, with deftness, spareness and care.