Ross Taylor
10 x 13 3/8 in.
Further images
A birdlike sweep of feathery pinks and greens swerve around a more intricate aerial mapwork of carefully placed lines on this small canvas.
Taylor’s title relates to concepts of concealment and the importance of having both private and public space to visit regularly. He recalls the 90’s cult brand Spliffy waistcoat he owned when he was ten saying: “it had many pockets that I did not know what they were used for. I think about this waistcoat a lot, with its hidden drug connection” and how “those pockets were supposed to be used for concealment, but I chose to ignore them”.
The painting is oil on linen and exhibits Taylors process of working in and out of the painted surface over the revisitings of many years. In some places the canvas weave is exposed as another texture amongst lacunae of paint.
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’”.
Ross Taylor (b. 1982, Harrow, London) lives and works in London and completed his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London, in 2008. In 2018 he was selected as artist-in-residence at The Edward James Foundation, and between 2015-16 was The Abbey Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome, Italy. Recent exhibitions include, Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw, Larsen Warner, Stockholm, 2021; The decorator always gets paid least, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, 2020; Rattus Rattus, Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, 2020 and The studio at 4am, Hastings Contemporary, East Sussex, 2020.
Exhibitions
By the Skin of Our Teeth (2022), Brooke Benington, LondonLiterature
The Wick, Spotlight Interview with Ross Taylor (online)