Diana Taylor
Artist statement:
Working across painting, textiles and print media, my practice revolves around notions of time, loss and ruin in visual culture.
I explore the condition of our contemporaneity as punctuated by poly-temporality through an archive of reproductions- living in an age of the ‘re’. Drawing from my heterogeneous, potentially anarchic, (non) system composed of personal/historical/contemporary artefacts and printed matter, I layer multiple media through methods of scanning, collaging and fragmenting as a way of reassembling history, investigating a material presence (and absence) of the past, within the present. I am interested in these ideas as paralleled by the notion of the multiverse, in which multiple realities exist simultaneously.
Recurring motifs, which reflect my interests, are appropriated from museum catalogues, architectural reference books, craft kits, botanical guides, books on geology, astronomy and astrology, ancient ruins, domestic patterns and other print ephemera. These images, often of poor quality or resolution, are further subjected to digital entropy through ruination and fragmentation, alluding to the contradictions and uncertainties of our times.
The textile assemblages combine remnants from the paintings with recycled bricolage fabrics, swatches, samples and screen-prints of flattened 3D scans mapping folded fabrics. Craft processes including crotchet, embroidery and weaving are flat-bed and 3D scanned, enlarged, screen-printed and then worked back into with hand-stitching.
The processes traverse at different paces through the various logics of time, from the hand-stitching of an unknown craftsperson to the digital screen, silk-screen, and then back to the hand, into a re-assembled analogue/ digital artefact.
