Taylor’s work collapses time, history, fact and fiction into beautiful new worlds replete with certainty and contradiction.
even, still captures the disquieting oddness and game-like artifice of 17th century Dutch still life painting to explore the inherent beauty and ‘truthiness’ of the photographic image. Resplendent at the centre of a native floral garland, an earless fluorescent pink dingo stares mutely from the image’s liquid gloss, elsewhere a possum stalks alongside a honeyeater, a fluorescent breakfast is served. Seeming to float, blending perspective, small oddities and disruptions entice and cajole. Image and reality flex and bend, hovering between the known and unknown, the real and unreal. Strangely familiar, beautifully stilled.
As arts writer Jemima Kemp has observed, Taylor’s work is born ‘where nature meets culture, one where the fragility of the bush is threatened by rabbits, buffaloes yet one where this proliferative energy, where nature abundant, beautiful, slippery and resistant pushes back and evades culture’s force. These bright harbingers of disquiet slip into the frame dismantling its certainties, and yet always evading our grasp’.