Born in Macclesfield in 1975, George Taylor moved at the age of 10 onto the farm set within its own steep-sided secluded valley in a remote part of Gloucestershire. Here she began working with her father as he tended livestock and managed the woodland, initiating what has been a lifelong enchantment with the natural world especially as a creative environment beyond landscape solely as a leisure destination – more as a site from to engage with contemporary issues such as embodied experience in place.
At Bretton Hall, University of Leeds, she experimented with sculptural form and constructed environments, introduced by tutor John Penny to the work of Minimalism and Land artists such as Walter de Maria. Indeed the latter’s ‘Lightning Field’, 1977, prompted her to install six 30-foot steel poles in the small lake in the valley.
Her studies culminated in 1998, with the creation of total immersive environments where the viewer was oriented in a single direction through feather-lined passages connotative of our passage through life, articulating her interest in Gaston Bachelard’s metaphorical evocation of the links between phenomenological architectural spaces and the nuomenal world sensed from within our body and memory, succinctly captured by his phrase ‘intimate immensity’.