'Tim Scott: Curlicue I II III' was an exhibition that brought together remade versions of a trio of sculptures initially produced by the sculptor Tim Scott in 1963. These sculptures were fabricated from archival records and in close consultation with the artist, as part of a research project carried out by Neil Clements. They were exhibited at Ivory Tars, Glasgow in September 2023.

This project centred around the re-fabrication of a trio of sculptures that Tim Scott produced in 1963, which make innovative use of malleable foam sheeting. An editioned version of one of these sculptures was acquired by the collector Alistair McAlpine and subsequently gifted to the Tate Gallery in 1970. The remaining pair of works from this group were later destroyed, owing in part to the fragility and limited life-span of the materials employed.

This exhibition was the first occasion these works have ever been publicly displayed as a group. Marking sixty years since their creation, this display intended to shed light on an important, yet overlooked moment in post-war British sculpture.

In the 1960s Scott became associated with what would become widely known, albeit to the ambivalence of its principal exponents, as ‘New Generation sculpture’. Named after a 1965 exhibition surveying an emerging tendency involving synthetic, brightly-hued surfaces and the abandonment of plinths or pedestals as a mode of display, New Generation sculpture frequently made use of materials that lay beyond a traditional lexicon. Scott’s own works of the period were constructed from amongst other things, glass, acrylic plastic, fibreglass-reinforced resin, welded aluminium and latex foam.

The three sculptures were remade by Neil Clements using archival records held by the Tate Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Scott himself. The project addressed questions concerning the treatment of degradable materials and the relationship between the disciplines of art history, conservation and curation.