Understood
We use cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. By continuing without changing your cookie settings, we assume you agree to this. Please read ourprivacy policy

Damian Taylor

Damian is a Senior Ruskin Tutor for Studio Practice and in History & Theory at the Ruskin.

My work has consistently been stimulated the complexities of perception and the limits of representation, central to which has been exploring the interplay of the verbal and the visual, the bodily foundation of thought, and the fundamental embeddedness of humanity within technology. I'm interested in deep histories of image making and how these relate to the unprecedented economy of digital images today. Although previously also encompassing print, video, and online collaborative practice, my works now typically fall somewhere between painting and photography. They are driven by material exploration and are almost invariably underscored by a fascination with the animating power of light, by a play between the tangible and the intangible, and by experimenting with the complex and conflicting layers of time that can be drawn into the experience of an artwork.

I studied painting at Chelsea and the Slade before completing a practice-led doctorate at the Ruskin. I've also held research fellowships at Yale and Oxford. Alongside my art, I've published a modest number of academic articles on seemingly disparate subjects (on, for instance, new understandings of electricity and early nineteenth-century landscape painting, photomechanical reproductive technologies and early twentieth-century sculpture, puppets and early twenty-first century video art) in journals such as October, the Oxford Art Journal, British Art Studies, and the Sculpture Journal. At some point I should probably bring to a close a couple of interrelated book projects, one on disembodied hands and embodied thought, the other on John Constable and the boundaries of painting.

Email damian.taylor@rsa.ox.ac.uk

damiantaylor.org

hiddevanseggelen.com