Ross Taylor’s work is concerned with an emergent space; a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption, where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated. The studio-cave is the stomach and the objects within it are its antimony.
Through painting, performance and making books, Taylor sets the things he makes amongst the hypnogogic dark and dank terrior that represents the ambiguity of the creative process. A topsoil, fizzy with habits and indecision, where practice and method become redundant and in their place the monstrous and all that is unidentifiable seep. Bad habits, good habits, objects made from boredom, from damage and internal mutterings, the kinds of actions and behaviours that belong to the margins of your day, to pick and scratch, wait and stare at, to let your attention be removed from the matter at hand. A place in which in-built fictions can intermingle, morph, and collide, connect to the beginnings of consciousness and maintain the hallucinations, patterns and images that unlock the biological happenings and evolutionary knowledge that the artistic journey encapsulates - where a work might ‘happen’.
The restless stomach-cave will rage, and correspondingly pacify, wherein each stain, drip, blob, and smear, will appear to congeal, much like grammar. Through the contemplation of this surface, each idea, word or moment running through my head has space to intensify, making it conceivable to take control of chaotic ideas, order the subconscious and attempt to model thoughts that are somewhat impossible. Condensations materialise as images begin to float to the surface, smaller gestures soon begin to make up larger gestures and are beaten back until an indexical and non-descriptive logic begins to take over. Each mark, far more concerned with the flux of becoming rather than of merely being, maintains a distance and allows me to consider ideas in a language that is non-specific and timeless. One painting’s pigment is scraped and applied to another, creating a cannibalistic process where every surface made, either past, present or future, is immediately connected to another, and only becoming clear when passing within view of the rest.
In 2014, Taylor co-founded Mrs Paterson’s Press, a dedicated space for disseminating the work of artists and writers who are preoccupied with historical and contemporary ideas surrounding the portrayal of thought and experience through visual means. Working directly with contributors to collectively print, bind and distribute their work, the press aims to embolden an approach to and understanding of the type of form or image, which can be directly deciphered from the raw material that rises from the unconscious.
