This text was commissioned by The Cyprus High Commission, London and Art Seen, Nicosia

Conceived by Maria Stathi for Art Seen in Nicosia and touring to the Cyprus High Commission in London, Diana Taylor’s Phantom Yarns happily rhymes the artist’s British/ Greek-Cypriot heritage with the auto-ethnography that runs through the core of her work.

The exhibition develops Taylor’s longstanding interest in how we experience and make sense of time in an era of information overload, where abundance and infinite access compete with the urge for order and elucidation. With all material culture at our fingertips, we are more tightly than ever enmeshed in a visual continuum that cuts through the veils of space and temporality. This availability has the effect of intermittently flattening and deepening perspective, leaving us afloat in a world of images, with all its attendant fallout of wonder and disorientation.

Taylor’s practice, encompassing painting, screenprinting, needlework and 3D printing, imbues the analogue pleasures of touch, layering, tearing and weaving, with the fugitive qualities of the digital realm of abstraction, manipulation and ceaseless mutation. The works in Phantom Yarns explore idea of what the contemporary is at any one moment, by sampling and appropriating the materials of that time. Taylor uses textiles, Photoshopped images and wire mesh readings variously screenprinted, collaged, painted, woven and embroidered onto large-scale fabric assemblages and canvases.

Originally a painter, using textiles, print and online images as references in her works, Taylor initially experimented with fabric as a material during a residency at Modern Art Oxford in 2015. Curated by Jeremy Deller, Love Is Enough explored the role of craft, industrial processes and mass production in the works of William Morris and Andy Warhol. Reluctant to paint in public, Taylor chose instead to use her mother’s tablecloths and needlework, as well as fabric picked up in charity and craft shops, to make fabric assemblages in response to the exhibition. Following this, she began a practice-based PhD at Sheffield Hallam University and in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in London.

Using archives and existing images, Taylor has always had an interest in sampling and appropriation. An infant love of picturebooks and infographics endures in a studio filled with volumes on needlework, craft and textiles, as well as architecture, geography, geology and the ancient world. She has a shared interest with William Morris into how we make things and how, in turn, things make our world.

Her late mother’s diagnosis with Sporadic CJD, and decline over the course of this period of study and experimentation, have brought into unexpected relief the influence of Taylor’s childhood home, and of her mother’s passion for pattern and needlework. Born in Cyprus in the early 1950’s, Soula and her sisters were schooled in the traditional arts of embroidery, knitting, tapestry and crochet, and Taylor grew up surrounded by her mother’s handiwork. In common with so many families of mixed heritage (her father is English), home was threaded through with strands from Soula’s past life in Cyprus, but also her more contemporary love of fashion and of traditional English styles in decoration.

Our obsession with digital archiving of the minutiae of everyday life adds new dimensions to the process of grieving. Not only are we left to negotiate with our emotions and the tangible challenges presented by repositories of clothes, furniture, photographs and personal collections; we are learning to get to grips with a digital legacy where so much that once was mercifully lost to the passage of time persists. Or as Mark Fisher, whom Taylor quotes in her writings has put it, “in conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost”. The past is more than ever embedded in our present; for better and for worse.

It is not just that our daily lives are saturated with images; from the relentless scroll of Instagram and rolling news, to Snapchat, selfies, shelfies and the ever-decreasing circles of the blogosphere. It’s that those images endure in a persistent format that is not amenable to traditional forms of over-writing or erasure. They saturate and circulate beyond our control.

As a child, Taylor lived in rural Wiltshire, and regular visits to the Bronze-Age White Horse in Uffington and nearby Neolithic burial ground of Wayland’s Smithy fired her imagination. Early paintings saw her turning to her Greek Cypriot roots and to the ruins of antiquity, to the beauty of fragments and the part they play in romanticising the past and its readings over time. For Taylor, these shards and vestiges also speak to a fascination with how things break down. Alongside them, she began to explore images of the aftermath of natural disasters, deliberately anonymised so as to express a general timelessness of dissolution, and of things falling apart.

In order to nudge the process of disintegration along its way, Taylor puts her images through a mill of digital erosion, deliberately echoing the glitch and the repeated iteration of the pixel as an eroded unit of information, endlessly shared and circulated. The result is a purposeful impoverishment of the image, enacting Hito Steyerl’s observation of “the poor image [that] tends towards abstraction”. Taylor sees in it parallels with the error of the hand and the childhood urge to scribble over and obscure, expressed in her work in what she calls the process of un-painting; born of a need to intentionally disrupt the work when she senses it is becoming somehow too “safe” or resolved. For Taylor, ruin acts as a metaphor for the process of making, the compulsion to break down or somehow ruin, obstruct, delete, fragment in order ultimately to reconstruct the image.

There is an irony in deliberately imbuing decorative textiles – conceived to render the experience of the domestic beautiful and welcoming – with so much “failure”, and infiltrating it with images of disaster. Diana Taylor’s works scratch the veneer of everyday life to uncover intimations of darker truths.

In Phantom Yarns, these layered motifs of pattern, decorative art, material culture and natural disaster are resolved in a series of paint, paper and fabric collages.

Taylor takes her mother’s textiles and other found, donated and bought materials and scans them quickly or at low resolution. Elsewhere, she crumples them up and makes 3D scans of them, then flattens out the wire mesh readings, subverting the intended use of technology conceived to generate 3D facsimiles, and pushing her source material back to two dimensions. These iterations are collaged or screen-printed onto the canvases, and often overwritten by drawing or embroidery. From handmade, to digitised, to printed and finally again reclaimed by the hand and its processes, bringing the cycle of authorship full circle, from hand to hand.

The ubiquity of the palimpsest in our culture expresses our awareness that as we search for consistency, and a narrative to make sense of the formlessness of existence, so we become conscious that it is an action of moving through narratives, relics, vestiges and clues. The urge to give form is forever at war with this miasma of images, of echoes and inflections, by turns clarifying and confusing. In doing so, it presents reality as layered and inscrutable; and the search for meaning and reassurance, poignant and absurd. 

Photography by Nicos Loucas (Nicosia) and BJ Deakin (London)