Still Life: A Landscape of Object Relations
Still Life: A Landscape of Object Relations
Letter to the staff and members who will attend the 80th Leicester Group Relations Conference
Posted
29 May 2026
Juliet Scott: Carborundum experiments on varied Japanese paper
Juliet Scott, Business Curator and Practice Director Arts & Organisation at the Tavistock Institute, will be accompanying the 80th Leicester Group Relations Conference in August 2026. She will develop an artistic installation there, using image and language, called Still Life: A Landscape of Object Relations.
Dear Leicester Conference 2026
As I write, the Leicester Conference begins to stir for its 80th happening and with that the unconscious processes of its context as an organisation at this time.
This illustrated letter outlines plans for an art work that will be part of the relational and material fabric of this year’s conference introducing a visual and contemporary landscape of object relations into the context and experience of group relations learning.
The theme of the conference in this 80th anniversary year is Still Life.
Still Life follows on from Living in a Fragmented Environment (LIFE) the theme of the Leicester Conference in 2025. Still Life as an art genre is the juxtapositioning of two opposing words. Still is quiet, not moving, inanimate and also still remains, still is forever and ongoing, always, the ritual and routine of living.
Still is not still, it is life.
Still Life: A Landscape of Object Relations will take place within the socio-technical conditions of time, task and territory which inform the Leicester Conference and are principles of organisational design.
Time: Still Life is longitudinal, forever and ongoing, the slow accumulation and shifts in the stories of objects. Objects hold time within them, shifting in meaning and significance.
Task: arrangement of objects implies ritual and routine of our ordinary lives, human activity precedes them, objects are the residue of task, tools and technologies.
Territory: still life as about space, placement, boundaries, what belongs where and how objects are located in space.
As an artistic genre, still life is a composition of objects representing the routine and pattern of human life. It is an inclusive art form of or for the overlooked, concerned with writing down or drawing of the trivial or ordinary things, the everyday ephemera that say something of people and culture. These domestic scenes are in contrast to the high encounters and dramas staged by people. Leicester Conference 2026 is a place for both.
As still life’s aspect of rhopography levels human life and brings it down to its basic encounters with the material world, it describes bonds of familiarity with ourselves, the objects around us, and our fellow creatures.
Bryson, N. (1990) Looking at the Overlooked
Still Life. Teasel, bark, glass vessel, shell, beeswax, seaweed.
Juliet Scott: Graphite powder and ink on watercolour paper. 2024
My study of still life is strongly connected to my emotional inheritance from women in my family who lost their fathers, grandfathers, brothers, husbands and sons.
History that became tangible to me, in 2009, as I stood on a beach in Tel Aviv, looking onto the scene of my grandfather’s death. My mother was two and a half when he was torpedoed in the Mediterranean Sea. My mother, her sister, her mother, both her grandmothers between them lost fathers, sons and husbands.
A lot of women were left behind. My mother’s parental figures became my great grandmother, Grans, cook and butler. Annie and Leonard.
I was very fond of Leonard. He was everything I would have liked my father to have been.
Kind...and patient.
Objects and stories were charged with loss.
A bottle of toilet cleaner
A bottle of shoe whitening
A hairspray can
A pair of egg poachers
A portable stove in a yellow ochre, leather case that belonged to my great grandmother
A solid iron mechanical part given to me by a life long friend
A Wiltshire flint
I collected everyday, ordinary objects and configured and reconfigured them as still life composition and the subject of my art. More recently I introduced objects from the natural world.
Tree bark
A teasel head
A puffball case
Dried seaweed
Beeswax from my London allotment
Still Life has evolved into my research as practice where a space has opened up between the compositions in my studio and group and organisational scenes. I spiral in between these. The organisational scenes are still lifes themselves, relational, charged with emotion and difficult experience, textured, aesthetic forms.
Washing fruit here, this isn’t good either. Hand washing instructions remain on the wall, water has seeped into the laminated instructions, clouding the words and images on the paper. A long 20 seconds washing hands under those same taps. Water is now dripping through the improvised sieve and I reach for a blue hand towel to mop up the excess.
Extract from Strawberries. A poetic reflection on hidden trauma within the Portsmouth Abuse and Rape Counselling Service (PARCS) Grows Everybody Oral History Project
The objects have developed an agency of their own and become mediators, supporting me in processing and sense making this work. Through this I’ve come to imagine that in the day to day interaction of people and groups what is taking place is a dynamic and collective practice of still life making, where internal psychoanalytic objects become tangible experience in communicative interaction.
Teasel and Seaweed
Juliet Scott: Carborundum on Japanese Paper, 2024
Reading Marion Milner has helped me in finding and living this inquiry as a ‘life of my own’. I became interested in her description of a therapeutic relationship with ‘Susan’ whose experience is mediated through drawings, often of spirals. Universal psychic and spiritual shapes, explored also by the artist Louise Bourgeois, which powerfully evoke paradox and that I could see as a shape and an object of organising.
Juliet Scott: Carborundum experiments on varied Japanese paper
For some years I have been wanting to try a printmaking technique known as carborundum. I began a series of experiments to find a material process that could express this practice of still life making between the objects in the studio and the objects in the organisation.
Carborundum is a hard abrasive grit normally used industrially for making sandpaper and industrial non-slip surfaces. The grit comes in three grades, fine, medium and coarse, which can create a range of textural, painterly, expressive marks on the plate when mixed with or sprinkled on an acrylic medium.
I started drawing the objects from the natural world I have been gathering, observing, concentrating on the emergent, gestural and relational in their form. In the image above teasel is layered over beachcombed dry seaweed.
It is still, still life.
I printed these onto different Japanese papers, similarly textural, the paper is both strong and delicate. The densely packed fibres carry the impression left by the carborundum, retaining the marks and embossing them into the paper. A kind of palimpsest of things past and present.
Beeswax, glass vessel, puffball and poppy seed head
Juliet Scott: Carborundum on Somerset paper, 2025
This life of objects has also manifested in a curational practice and interest in the changing meaning of objects in museum, gallery and organisational spaces. Glissant in his Poetics of Relations proposes the Trembling Museum: “a setting for creating relationships between objects, people and histories, rather than imposing categories.”
This is still, still life. And this is the sensibility I aspire to in materialising internal objects, surfacing and renewing stories about human culture, ritual and routine through a staging of my artistic research as part of the fabric of the conference.
This will expand how I have worked with still life before. The carborundum experiments so far create sensory surfaces, material presence and deep layers of time. What exactly will unfold from them, I don’t yet know, but I aim to create an art installation that is part of the relational field for you to encounter, step into, work and interact with as part of your learning.
I invite you too to step into this as part of the many layers of this unique two week learning experience and look forward to seeing you in August.
Juliet
Juliet Scott ‘previewing’ her research at RinA’s annual community gathering.
Rill, Devon, May 2025.
About Juliet Scott and her work
Juliet Scott is a visual artist, consultant, educator and leader who has developed her work within the Tavistock Institute’s system psychodynamic traditions, notably working with the Institute’s archive over an ongoing period. The work has included her own artistic responses, curated exhibitions, performances, choreographic research and multi site events including TIHR’s 70th anniversary festival in 2017, Reimagining Human Relations for our Time and the Tiny Factory’s Memory Machine, 2024.
Group relations and systems psychodynamics inform her work as an artist with organisations.
Still Life: A Landscape of Object Relations will be a public and experiential manifestation of Juliet’s Schumacher Society Research in Action fellowship exploring still life as a relational art form that surfaces stories about human culture, ritual and routine in the context of organisation.
The Schumacher Society Research in Action Community is an international community of practice dedicated to social inquiry. Members participate in a disciplined, joint inquiry process, called research-in-action, aiming to influence conversations across fields while always centering the everyday experiences of practitioners.
References
Akhtar, S. (2011) Matters of Life and Death. London: Routledge
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bryson, N. (1990) Looking at the Overlooked. London: Reaktion Books
Diamond, M., Allcorn, S. and Stein, H. (2004) The surface of organizational boundaries: A view from psychoanalytic object relations theory. Human Relations, 57(1), pp. 31-53
Glissant, E. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Miller, E.J. (1959) Technology, territory and time: The internal differentiation of complex production systems. Human Relations, 12, pp. 243-272
Milner, M. (2011) The Hands of the Living God. London: Routledge
Milner, M. (2011) A Life of One’s Own. London: Routledge
Ogden, T.H. (1992) The Primitive Edge of Experience. London: Karnac Books
Scott, J. (2011) Light in my life. Organisational and Social Dynamics, 11(1), pp. 21-40
