Meet Your Maker: Ross Taylor

i'm pretty much in love with Ross Taylor's work. you can read my thoughts on his show Phatland here, where i've written a review of the show.

so, with no introduction now needed, here's Ross submitting to my barrage of curious querying ...

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 Ross Taylor, Phatland

Kent:
First up, the meticulous detail in your work is mesmerising. How is your eyesight and what's the status on carpal tunnel syndrome?

Ross:

I have to say that until now, the hands haven’t given me too much trouble… although I did get a minor blood clot in my arm a few years back from drawing standing up! It’s a pretty intense process on the eyes, but working that closely allows you to kind of drift off into the flow of it.

Kent:

It must be meditative working like that. Do you have a plan when you start your drawings?

Ross:
I never have a specific plan, I pick a spot on the paper where I feel comfortable to start and go with that. I often have an early sense of how the composition will work in relation to where the eye should be drawn to next, but it always inevitably changes. You can see the repetitive gestures throughout the drawing, I use them to start a dialogue with the surrounding space, they may end up forming into a rock or some other matter, but it is the process of repetition that allows me into the drawing if that makes sense. I suppose that it’s the closest I get to a form of meditation.

 Ross Taylor, Which way the wind

Kent:
There's a couple of figurative drawings in the mix here and they have the body, especially the head (which we associate with the identity of a figure) dissolving into fragments and forming into landscape. What's your thoughts on the blurring of landscape and portraiture? I mean, I read some of your landscapes as quite psychological in nature, like 'inner' portraits.

Ross:

I made a series of works involving figures to test the specifics of what I was trying to achieve within the drawings. The general idea was to have a greater control of the narrative, but through this I have learnt that I am not necessarily the best ‘interpreter’ of the drawings in their completion (nor do I want to be). I have found that because I work from nothing, the negotiation from one mark to the next interrogates more of me than the depiction of a figure ever could in the landscape, so I now leave the figures out. I think it’s more interesting that way.

Kent:

There's a really subtle inclusion of colour in the work, that's only noticeable at close inspection. What's going on there?

Ross:
The colour is a new thing, parts have been rubbed away to take the edge of that kind of 'illustrated' look, but it also works as a kind of visual pit stop in the composition. I hope that it affords the eye a little breather and then you can re-address the drawing again once more.

Kent:
What's next on the horizon for you Ross? Do you have another body of work on the go or a plan for your next direction?

Ross:

I have a series of smaller works on the go for my next show at the end of September, then I plan on taking a month off for research (not master chef). I would like to develop new imagery and start to work on a new body of ideas that play around with the notion of how everything is interconnected. I guarantee that there will be more rocks...

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brilliant! we'll keep you posted about Ross's upcoming shows and in the meantime you should get down quick to see the fantastic drawings on show here. there's some large-scale works and some medium-sized, deliciously framed works. they look amazing, they are loaded with invisible ideas and connotations, and they keep offering new experiences each time you look at them. plus, Ross is clearly heading somewhere and you can both be a part of that and help make it happen. buy art! (editor's note: bias? what bias?)

taylor made mark making

Ross Taylor had an amazing drawing in a group at c3 Gallery in abbotsford that i saw and loved. it was delicate, full of open space and intricate, detailed penmanship. some time later, through a series of odd coincidences, he landed in kyneton (his girlfriend at the time came to buy a Lucy James artwork) and after i showed him a photo i took of his work that i had kept in my phone (filed under 'shit-hot artists i need to contact') he agreed to put on an exhibition with us.

i love a good set of coincidental connections.

the project space is now lined with a series of fantastic drawings for his solo exhibition - Phatland.

Ross Taylor, Phatland (detail)

on the rock-like walls of the space, meticulously drawn landscapes float amid a silent white void. there's a few signs of life, appearing sporadically throughout the vast open planes. mostly, it's these wonderful little rock formations, the impact of erosion and time sculpting them into totemic formations - like ziggurats.


look a little closer and you can see the laborious effort of mark-making. miniscule little lines build up to create the elements in the landscape. there's hours of detailed, focused concentration poured into every large sheet of paper. and yet, although made from the tiniest of thin little lines and dots, vast and sweeping expanses are created and we hover, as if from a bird’s eye view above the world.

Ross Taylor, Phatland (detail) 

this could all be seen as a reflection of natural processes, where infinitesimal increments in growth and decay accrue over years, centuries and millennia. where micro processes produce macro results. in an eternal dance, biological forms create landscapes and landscapes create biological forms. It's a reminder that all life started long ago as rocks. rocks break down and dissolve, becoming sand and soil and the building blocks of biology. and then life itself liquifies, petrifies and turns back to sand, soil and rock.

Ross's work throws up all this ideas in the simple act of making marks on sheets of paper. it's quite compelling. he has a way with the composition of his pieces too, where the spaces he leaves become just as important in the work as the very carefully placed ink marks. so much effort put into the drawing and so much power emanating from the blank parts untouched.

i've heard people refer to them as post-apocalyptic. as if most life has been swept away by catastrophe and the barest elements remain. alternatively, they look like planetary maps or moonscapes. either way, they read like the potential for life. you can't help but look around for signs of it. you can't help but read into them a sense of hope. is that little rocky outcrop actually a little tower? what's being built here? who populates this place and where the hell are they?

on that last point you can't help but be reminded that it's you that populates these landscapes. it's your ideas pouring into the vastness, it's your wandering thoughts making stories about why it looks the way it looks. what a lovely gift from Ross, to provide this playground of ideas for our minds.

thanks Ross!

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come see these works in the flesh, where they do their best work. exhibition runs until 5 August.

mid winter art

this is the second time i've called on damon albarn to provide a soundtrack to an art opening video piece. i wonder what that means. i do know he collects art. i like him for that. i would have put jacques soddell's sound piece on here, but really, it just wouldn't do it justice because you have to immerse yourself in that sound.

anyway - here's a snippet of an opening night launch. if you haven't been to one, you should totally change that.

art warms the air

in the dead middle of winter, with rain and wind and chill biting at your bones, there's few things as heart warming as dozens and dozens of people turning up to look closely at the creative work of talented people. artists who, more often than not, work at multiple jobs, pour funds into projects that offer limited hope of financial return but plug away obsessively producing beautiful and captivating sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs and sounds just for us to engage with.

i know i have vested interests in this, but it still always amazes me. sitting in studios, sitting in bedrooms, standing at easels, investing time into creating work. making art is not working for a wage. you can't clock in and claim $25 an hour for your time. and then, to add more tension to the process, putting themselves and the public opinion of their work on the line, for anyone to come and stand in front of and say, 'my kid could do that'. but .... hopefully... you'll get the occasional 'wow, that's amazing' or 'shit, i never thought of that' or watch someone stand in front of your work mesmerised, saying 'what? you made that video of an exploding stadium out of still photos? and the plumes of smoke are pyroclastic gas from volcanoes? holy fuck that's cool'.

so, last night, with freezing central highlands air driving all and sundry for the comfort of their doonas, a happy, warm and excited crowd milled about the spaces of the galleries, talking about the artists and their work, and noone even noticed it was cold anymore. it's so accurate that in our language we use the term 'warmth' to describe relationships between people.

we warmly invite you. that warms my soul. you warm my heart.

anyway - last night was great fun. i managed to get some snaps of the event, in between chatting about the work and catching up with people. and while i'm here, again with confessed vested interest, if you want to put some warmth into your life, put a little warmth into the life of others too, i can show you some seriously amazing creative work, by some amazingly creative people, that would look amazing in your house or workspace. seriously. some of these guys are going to be huge.

end of rant.

start of photos.

Ross Taylor

Sally Blenheim 

Nicholas Ives

 

Michael Needham

John Barter

Ross Taylor

instal excitement

even without recourse to the great camera i sometimes use for these videos, i am so excited by these next shows that a preview video was always going to surface. it's an inevitability.

for this one, i made it with it my phone! aaah, technology. how i love thee.

there's some very exciting things being unwrapped, pinned up, plugged in and turned on. only just last night i stood in the middle of gallery 1 with sound artist Jacques Soddell as we listened to his 16 minute surround sound sound art piece filling up the space around us. he's pulled apart the sound of white noise, broken it into fragments, tweaked frequencies and sine waves, and produced sounds that will quite literally alter the physical space around you. unbelievable.

Ross Taylor filled the project space with his delicate drawings. the reproduction of them in photos only go halfway at hinting at the intricacy and the intensity of the build up of little marks. you could section off a small 10cm x 10cm section of any drawing and have a full landscape in it. but most of them are over a metre square!

and that's just 2 of the 8 artists we have on show. get a glimpse of the instal process here:



July2012 preview from kent wilson on Vimeo.