The artist shares thoughts from her residency at Nirox that Taylor believes was key to her artistic development- pushing her towards new artmaking modes.
How did this
residency shift your thinking as an artist?
Nirox is in the cradle of humankind. This couldn't be
more central to my work. The natural world is a perfect matrix of
interconnected harmonious laws that don't need to be enforced. Everything
belongs; everything is part of a greater whole.
Evolution has resulted in an emergence out of this
system. Homo sapiens. One step away from instinct takes us into perceptions of
duality. We continually forget our inherent knowledge of connectedness. We are
not held by a grid of instinct, we have free will and choice of action.
I am looking at how this 'departure' effects our psyche.
Much of my work is an appreciation of the world as an outside observer with a
distant sense of belonging. The wonder and beauty of the system that we came
from -a longing, as it were, for the peace and coherence of the natural laws
that govern the natural world.
There are fossils of stromatolites all over the veld at
Nirox. A stromatolite is one of the first muliticellular organisms ever to
evolve. They are circular, small dots and big dots, some as large as 1m in
diameter. These made me look into the idea of the fundamental building blocks.
A moderated aesthetic that would infiltrate all my work. Energy particles.
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| Nirox is in the cradle of humankind and runs residencies for artists. It also hosts the annual Winter Sculpture Fair. |
What in your opinion is the role of a residency for an artist?
I had uninterrupted time that allowed all my thinking
over the last few years to come together. Processing that would have taken
years otherwise. I sat in front of the fire every night and sketched and wrote,
and looked back through all my sketchbooks and journals and made these
connections.
It's this time for development that the busy day to day
life doesn’t allow. Art is about thinking before and during the making- and
it moves in cycles. Being removed from your everyday circumstances and being
afford the time and space is critical to pushing your practice.
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| "I had uninterrupted time that allowed all my thinking over the last few years to come together." says Taylor. |
Glass has made an emergence into your
work as a key element- both as material and concept. What were the origins of
the glass works and the coming installation- how did you come to this method of
working?
I have been looking at multiple layers in a painting,
what is on the surface and what is underneath. Layers of perception and of
reality. I achieve these layers in my painting using various techniques and the
result is a sense of space. Like I have stretched the canvas open or breathed
air into it to expand its surface. I was then asked to put forward a proposal
for a large public sculpture and it got me thinking about how I can use layers
and the brush marks, and punctuation of paint in a sculptural format. From there
I tried painting on a few window panes that had been removed from our cottage
door and immediately fell in love with the technique. I could create marks on a
surface and combine surfaces to create one work.
Did you have to do a lot of technical experimentation to find out what works on glass?
Yes I tried glass stain, oils and acrylic. I tried engraving
on the surface first. I tried thick and thin paint, painting on the surface
horizontally and vertically and eventually settled on using thin enamel on a
horizontal surface .
You put your last together while expecting your first child. Did this influence the way in which your work has
grown conceptually?
I chose a natural delivery with no drugs, in order to do
this successfully and for your body to respond by producing the necessary
hormones, emotional state of mind becomes important to trigger the hormones. I
have to look at how I felt about bringing a new life into the world. My midwife
said I had to have faith in the world to have a smooth birth. You had to trust
and believe in the human experience. The world is a tough place, do a really
believe it's good to have children? This ties directly into discovering my own
place and how I fit in. The natural world undisturbed is a harmonious
interconnected matrix of natural laws perfectly in sync and coherent. People are
not! We have evolved out of that instinct driven system into free choice and
mayhem which causes suffering and feelings of isolation.
The turning point was realizing that the leap off the
cliff into duality also involves the ability to observe beauty, cognate (is
that a word, if not it should be!) experiences through awareness of the senses.
Create things, invest in relationships and have the capacity to choose grace
over chaos as a state of mind. What an adventure. I'd love to explore this wild
and wonderful world with a child.
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| Taylor was expecting her first child in the run up to her last exhibition. |
Where do you see your work evolving to from
here?
I am being drawn more and more towards installation
works. I will always paint, it us such a raw flexible medium that demands only
the best work. I think an artwork should dictate the medium, a piece is
conceptualized and then the best medium for that piece is chosen, not the other
way round. The medium shouldn't come before the artwork.
