Born with Down syndrome and deaf due to childhood scarlet fever, Judith Scott lived thirty-five years in institutions, between 1950 and 1985, until her twin sister Joyce obtained legal guardianship. In 1987, she joined the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, beginning a new life, that of an artist now recognized as exceptional.
Scott wraps, hides, protects, and isolates all kinds of objects— sticks, metal rings, branches, cardboard tubes, pieces of wood—using yarn of different colors. Some of her sculptures reach monumental dimensions and enact a mise-en-scène of secrecy: the entangled objects, forever hidden, structure the final work. Organic and intuitive, they evoke cocoons, body fragments, or « totems ». Her work was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2014. The central theme is the bond—severed with her sister during childhood.