George Taylor British, b. 1975
28 3/8 x 32 5/8 x 3 in
Inspired by ritual feather-work pieces from the Andes and Hawaii, Taylor’s painstakingly created works combine primal instinct and natural materials with today’s canon of contemporary art by using complex optical designs and sumptuous, iridescent colour.
Born in Macclesfield in 1975, George Taylor moved at the age of 10 with her family to a farm in Gloucestershire, initiating a lifelong enchantment with the natural world. At the 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. Her urge to form a new creative language, as she says “Donald Judd meets Meret Oppenheim”, which could speak of the daily reality of life and death in farming, drove her to work with the residual materials of living forms, animal skins such as goat or snake, then ultimately feathers.
Taylor has been greatly inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s writings on the links between phenomenological architectural spaces and the nuomenal world sensed from within our body and memory, succinctly captured by his phrase ‘intimate immensity’. Following college Taylor spent time as an art assistant in the studios of Dan Chadwick and Science Ltd.
Strongly influenced by George Bataille’s book 'Eroticism: Death and Sensuality', Taylor finds inspiration in the connection between religious death ritual and sexual behaviour, to the experience of absorption in artistic practice. Taylor's work also makes reference to the exquisite and charged death shrouds used in Andean rituals between 300 and 600 AD in which feathers were used symbolically to connect with the Gods.
In recent years, Taylor has used an extensive variety of feathers to create absorbing, large-scale pieces which blend qualities of sculpture, installation and painting. She painstakingly positions each tiny feather, producing a sedimentation of sumptuous layers of colour and depth as the piece develops. Her work is in numerous influential private collections.
Provenance
From the artist
Exhibitions
George Taylor: Intimate Immensity, 2018, Pangolin London
Masterpiece Art fair, London 2019.
Literature
George Taylor: Intimate Immensity, 2018, Pangolin LondonPublications
George Taylor: Intimate Immensity, 2018, Pangolin London