A terrible place appears as a primordial green soup where liberated eyes, lines and globular forms swirl. It speaks about the gases that are simultaneously created as residue left by signs of creativity, and about how evolutionary changes in our makeup have given way to artistic production. Taylor tends to preference the coarser bodily elements such as stomach acid and eggy farts, over 20/20 vision and eureka moments: a dirty eggy atmosphere loaded with culture, voices and characters.

In older times the word terrible meant sacred and therefore had more profound connotations. For Taylor the studio is a place of hallucinations that connect us with our forbearers: a hypnogogic dream state captured in the dark.

The painting is oil on linen and a closer inspection reveals the archaeology of this canvas over the artist’s revisitings of many years, which has been scored, scraped to the weave as texture or fallen in places into holes: some of which restitched, others left as dark voids.

Taylor sometimes describes his studio as a stomach: a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption, where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated, and where his inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, develops. His paintings emerge over several years through a process of painting and re-working until the final iteration rises to the surface. Sometimes abstract, sometimes bearing reference to figures or forms, internalised fictions rise and external influence seeps in.

“I like to think about paintings coming from this dark space, set amongst the hypnagogic dark and dank terrior that represents the ambiguity of the creative process. A place, 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, where you pick and scratch, wait and stare, allowing your attention to be removed from the matter at hand. A place in which in-built fictions can intermingle, morph, and collide, 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’”.