Art Seen is delighted to present our first solo exhibition by British / Greek-Cypriot artist Diana Taylor opening on the 15^th of September and continuing until the 23rd of October 2021. The show 'Phantom Yarns' is curated by Maria Stathi with text by Isabel de Vasconcellos.

“Phantom Yarns develops Taylor’s longstanding interest in how we experience and make sense of time in an era of information overload, where abundance and infinite access compete with the urge for order and elucidation. With all material culture at our fingertips, we are more tightly than ever enmeshed in a visual continuum that cuts through the veils of space and temporality. This availability has the effect of intermittently flattening and deepening perspective, leaving us afloat in a world of images, with all its attendant fallout of wonder and disorientation.

Taylor’s practice, encompassing painting, screen-printing, needlework and 3D printing, imbues the analogue pleasures of touch, layering, tearing and weaving, with the fugitive qualities of the digital realm of abstraction, manipulation and ceaseless mutation. The works in Phantom Yarns explore ideas of what the contemporary is at any one moment, by sampling and appropriating the materials of their time. Taylor uses textiles, Photoshopped images and wire mesh readings variously screen-printed, collaged, painted, woven and embroidered onto large scale fabric assemblages and canvases.

Originally a painter using textiles, print and online images as references in her works, Taylor initially experimented with fabric as a material during a residency at Modern Art Oxford. Curated by Jeremy Deller, Love Is Enough explored the role of craft, industrial processes and mass production in the works of William Morris and Andy Warhol. Reluctant to paint in public, Taylor chose instead to use her mother’s tablecloths and needlework, as well as fabric picked up in charity and craft shops to make fabric assemblages in response to the exhibition. Following this, she began a practice-based PhD at Sheffield Hallam University and in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in London.

Using archives and existing images, Taylor has always had an interest in sampling and appropriation. She has a shared fascination with Morris into how we make things and how, in turn, things make our world.

Early paintings saw her turning to her Greek Cypriot roots and to the ruins of antiquity, to the beauty of fragments and the part they play in romanticising the past and its readings over time. For Taylor, these broken vestiges also speak to a fascination with how things break down. Alongside them, she began to explore images of the aftermath of natural disasters, deliberately anonymised so as to express a general timelessness of dissolution, and of things falling apart.

In order to nudge the process of disintegration along its way, Taylor puts her images through a mill of digital erosion, deliberately echoing the glitch and the repeated iteration of the pixel as an eroded unit of information, endlessly shared and circulated. For Taylor, ruin acts as a metaphor for the process of making, the compulsion to break down or somehow obstruct, delete and fragment in order ultimately to reconstruct the image.

There is an irony in deliberately imbuing decorative textiles – conceived to render the experience of the domestic beautiful and welcoming – with so much “failure”. Diana Taylor’s works scratch the veneer of everyday life to uncover intimations of darker truths.”

Text by Isabel de Vasconcellos

Isabel de Vasconcellos is an independent curator and cultural producer, with extensive experience collaborating with artists and visual arts organisations to realise world-class public commissions and exhibitions. She writes on sculpture, painting, conceptual art, photography and design, and is the author of Fourth Plinth: How London Created the Smallest Sculpture Park in the World.

About the artist

Diana Taylor b. 1977 in U.K.

lives and works in London

Taylor is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, working in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, London. Taylor graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2010 with an MFA in Painting.

Recent shows include Can we Hold on, solo show at Centre of Contemporary Art, Mallorca (Sep 2018- Feb 2019), and group shows: Yesterday, Today and Forever: 5 Year Anniversary, Art Seen Contemporary, Nicosia, Cyprus. Curated by Maria Stathi; Contemporary British Painting Prize, ASC Gallery, London; A Strange Weave of Time and Space, curated by Jeanine Griffin (2020). Site Gallery Project Space, Sheffield, & Project Space Plus, Lincoln  University; Attempts to Escape, Art seen Contemporary, Nicosia, Cyprus, curated by Maria Stathi, ‘Re-Assemble’ at Colyer Bristow Gallery, London (2019). Residencies include CCA Andratx, (2018, 2012). The Factory Floor, Modern Art Oxford (2015), in response to the show Love is Enough: Warhol and Morris, curated by Jeremy Deller. She was shortlisted for the ConverseXDazed emerging artist award in 2015. In 2011 Taylor was awarded the Abbey Scholarship in Painting, at The British School at Rome and was A-I-R at East London Printmakers in the same year.

Her work is part of the Soho House Mumbai, V&A Museum Print Collection, The British Library (Slade Print Project) and Morgan Stanley public Collection as well in various Private Collections in China, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, UK and the USA.

Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 16:00 – 19:30 and Saturday 10:30 - 13:00 or any other day by appointment

For additional information, please contact:

Maria Stathi, Founder & Director +357 22006624

info@art-seen.org | www.art-seen.org

* Due to Covid-19 restrictions only a limited number of people can be present at any time inside the gallery space.

**Visitors should have a valid safe pass and must wear safe mask within the gallery at all times.