Lee Scott Hempson

Lee Scott was born in 1964 in Triangle, Zimbabwe. Lee Scott Hempson has recently completed her MTech in Graphic Design. It was a multidisciplinary self study in which she explored her practice as artist, researcher and teacher and visual activist. She is currently teaching drawing and illustration and supervises postgraduate Fashion and Textile design students at the Durban University of Technology. She is fortunate to have taught drawing and creative approaches to drawing for design, in a variety of disciplines over the years; disciplines such as Graphic Design, Textile Design, Fashion as well as workshops at the DUT Jewellery Design department, before it amalgamated with the Fine Arts programme.

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It is this wealth of experience combined with her Fine Arts training that has led her work to a particular place. The focus of Scott Hempson’s creative research is an exploration and acknowledgement of ‘hybridity’ which she has come to realise affects much of her thinking. ‘Hybridity’ according to the Webster online dictionary can be: derived from biological discourse where mixing different species can form an element on its own and a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions (or the blending of diverse cultures or traditions).

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Scott Hempson engages fashion culture appropriation because it is a world she inhabits daily. The use of the fashion silhouette comes from the conflicting notions about the relevance of fashion and identity. Her work goes beyond using fashion as means to construct an identity. Fashion or what people wear can be read in many ways; Efrat Tseëlon, a fashion theorist, regards fashion as masking.