Amy Scott-Pillow

2025 –

The garden gate is a permeable boundary, 
It’s sometimes latched, often left open and rarely locked
You can pass through this first line of defence, 
release the latch, push through and hear the squeal of iron on rust. 
Your presence is announced.

“Please shut the gate”

The gate is the threshold between private and public, a utilitarian and decorative object that allows those boundaries to be trespassed. The gates provide access and barrier and ask to whom does the land truly belong? Those that pay for the gates or those that call it home?

Gates litter our countryside, we pass through them to gain access to land owned by others. We ask permission each time we cross a boundary and whilst some landowners are welcoming, permitting access within strict guidelines. There are others that tightly lock the gates, wrap them up in barbed wire and claim the spaces to themselves. Great swathes of countryside in England and Wales are privately owned and inaccessible to the wider public. How can we care deeply about our environment when we are excluded from so much of it?

Concrete

Image above installed at Little Forest Land art May-June 2026
Little Forest Land Art – Judges Winner and Winner of the Public Vote 3D Printed Concrete Gate; printed at 3D Weber factory, Eindhoven, NL in April 2025

Ceramics

‘Parchment Street‘ 2025
Glazed Stoneware
2025

Plastics

‘Gated World‘
PLA
2025
Created for Winchester Gallery’s ‘Small Worlds’ Exhibition, in which artists, schools and local community groups were asked to create a globe to reflect their environment.