Borrowed Time: Diana Taylor

About

In Borrowed Time, Taylor presents a series of new paintings and an editioned screen-print, drawing from her collection of printed ephemera, spanning various histories across nature and culture. The title of the show references the ongoing method of appropriation in Taylor’s practice and recent PhD research which focussed on concepts of circular time.

Borrowed time also alludes to our present day climate crisis- seen through the ruptured images of plants and organic forms- as nature grows and then sinks into decay, reflecting her process of painting itself.

The series Escape Route; Plunging Through Flatness and The Forest Dream (2024) began with repeat screen-prints of details from Gustav Dore’s illustrations for Dante Alghieri’s, Divine Comedy. The mid 19th century original, Göttliche Komödie, comprising two volumes of highly intricate woodblock prints were reproduced by Dover in 1976. This modern version is subjected to another form of reproduction, in which Taylor scans, zooms, selects and crops areas of clouds and rock formations, to enlarge and screen-print. This same process of reproducing reproductions across various histories is applied to other books and ephemera in the artists’ collection- from botanical guides and taxonomies, to photocopy alignment pages and graph papers. Grids and weave structures of the screen-prints are mimicked in thick, haphazard brush marks, adding another mesh and level of repetition to the painting.

In other recent paintings such as Swamp Dweller, The Lovers, The Weltering Tangle, As Eden Sinks into Grief and Alice in iStock.com, aspects of her print archive- tapestry patterns, Tarot cards, and architectural diagrams, also form a layered, kind of archaeological understanding of time. The dissolving of past and present temporal boundaries is characteristic of our contemporary condition, in which everything can experienced at once as a multiplicity of histories.

The narrative rupture of the past, as experienced in the many revivals which haunt the present, is translated through the re-presenting or material presence of the past which sometimes reappear as fragments. An ongoing concern with ruination and things falling apart is echoed in the process of ‘un-painting’. By assembling digital and mechanical print technologies with traditional handcraft processes, Taylor seeks to re-materialise and reconstruct history, appropriate to this current hyper-complex temporal multiplicity.

Taylor completed a practice-based PhD with the William Morris Gallery, at Sheffield Hallam University, 2023. She graduated in 2010 from the Slade School of Fine Art with an M.F.A in Painting. Recent solo shows include A Ghost for Today, William Morris Gallery, London (2022); Phantom Yarns, Artseen Contemporary, Nicosia, Cyprus, (2021) which travelled to the Cyprus High Commission gallery, London (2022) and Can we Hold on?, (solo) at CCA, Mallorca (2018-19).

Recent group shows (2023) include Stable, Bobinska Brownlee New River; A Painting Show, Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne Gallery, Oxford; Montage, Fabrik Baterswil, Switzerland; Oh, tell me where your freedom lies- you'd rather cry, I'd rather fly, POSTROOM Gallery, London.

In 2019 Taylor was selected as a finalist in Contemporary British Painting Prize. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the Dazed X Converse Emerging Artist Prize.

PV Thursday 18 April 6-8pm at 36 Great Pulteney Street W1F 9NS, please RSVP info@bbnrgallery.com to confirm your attendance.