Taylor Bull

In my construction of landscapes, figure and ground hierarchies are defunct, rejecting the intangible but intransigent structures behind visual and spatial orientation.

Palm trees frame airy breadths of sky. Perception and schemata are distilled into a new psychological oasis, for my own satisfaction, sun-kissed and suffused with the transcendental pull of the American modernists of the Southwest.

A fascination for people lies at the heart of my work. I want to paint honest subjects. I want to paint who we are when we, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s enduring words, “are together with no one but ourselves”?

When I paint human subjects, I feel there is something misleading, predetermined or didactic in the attractiveness, gender, or race that I present.

I wonder - if I abstract bodies to the edge of recognition, can I reveal the souls that they contain?

This thought leads me to conjure a world in which fragility is celebrated, penetrability and softness are forces of connection.

The child, in art, references tropes of Romantic Painting in which its phantasmagoric depictions are symbols for ‘naughty or nice’, ‘instigators or angels’.

As I work into the subject, the child becomes more than a kitschy emblem of morality, there is an uneasiness to them that, for me, lends less prescription to their reading. There is a hysteria to their cherubic cheeriness, as well as their genderlessness. As allegorical portraits they appear both sincere and sardonic.

The human quality of the characters that I paint, and the way that they stare out of the picture brings intimacy and an emotional force. Each character resides on a threshold - a merging point of interiority and intersubjectivity.

Painting nude bodies confronts both a provocation and a vulnerability of sexuality. Carolee Schneemann posits: “The female nude is part of a revered tradition, although she is not to take authority over depictions of her nudity. She is just to be available.” The very act of me painting the female nude contests the misogynistic nature of historical figuration, typically painted by men for men, and lends agency to how women are portrayed. Schneemann calls this, “Being the image and the image-maker.”

I am interested in the formal nuances of bodies and their vast capacity for expression, bodies that insist on setting their own parameters and determining their own identities. My Nudes subvert high art's traditional effacement of base, bodily pleasure.

The body is the most fundamental of boundaries, particularly women’s bodies. When bodies spill out of their borders they become unsettlingly abject. Notions of abjection and the grotesque are largely inseparable from bodies, and painting into these subjects obliges the viewer to confront the source of their own fearful disquiet. Neither fully self nor other, the abject characters of my paintings undo the fiction of individual subjective integrity.

Setting unfamiliar figures against familiar surroundings renders them in the world, but not of the world. These paintings are not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world, but worlds in themselves.

Complex entanglements between figure and landscape in my work create an ecosystem of non-hierarchical associations. Figures and landscapes are non-anthropocentric.

For me, at least, the figures emerge as acutely emotional beings, with awareness of their own humanity. 

In extravagant colour and soft androgynous form, I pay compositional homage to Renaissance scenes such as the Virgin and Child, I am drawn to recalling such tableaus in which figures from worldly terrains are joined by the preternatural. 

The writing of Ursula K Le Guin has been helpful in recognising art as giving people the words to know their own experience. Le Guin writes, “Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want, too. If we never find our experience described in poetry or stories, we assume that our experience is insignificant” (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity, 2016).

In a line of inquiry that can be allied with Cyberfeminism, a wave of art and critical thought with roots in the Riot Grrrl-era 90s and going back even further, 70’s Afrofuturism and Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto", I push my exploration of form further. In flowing brushstrokes, I expand the aesthetics of the female body, with a view to shattering the veneer of its containment.

Italian feminist and activist Silvia Federic, writes ‘We are already living in a gender-fluid world, in which we are expected to be feminine and masculine at the same time,’ in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (2020).

I am interested in expressing a similar concurrency of gender. There is an anarchic power in the possibilities of our form. I explore the notion that outside the enslavement of entrenched cultural logic lies the possibility of permeating thresholds, metamorphosing one’s flesh and image, and subverting normative binaries in the refusal of being reduced to a single container or definition of being.

Amorphous figures and faces surge outwards, disobeying the physical limitations of human form. Apropos a contemporary vision of gender, I imagine a form that speaks to our human inclination toward self-regeneration. Limited and fast lines impose faces, limbs and sexual organs, and still the polymorphic forms resist demarcation.