ANITA TAYLOR

Anita Taylor is an artist and the Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at the Duncan of Jordanstone College, University of Dundee, Scotland. She is the founding Director of the annual Trinity Buoy Wharf International Drawing Prize (established in 1994) and founded Drawing Projects UK in 2009. Drawing lies at the core of her practice shaping her studio work, teaching, research, community engagement, and her activities as a writer and curator. Her advocacy for drawing as a means of communication, inquiry, and expression underpins her entire body of work. Taylor’s work has been exhibited widely across the UK and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Wells Cathedral, The Customs House South Shields, ‘DRAWN’ (Wunderkammer, Arts Council England), and William Wright Artists Projects, Sydney. She is the co-author of ‘Drawing’ (Cassell Illustrated) and has written for ‘The Guardian’, ‘Crafts Arts International’, and ‘RA Magazine’. Her interviews have appeared in ‘Interalia’, ‘Studio International’, ‘Times Higher Education’, and the British Library Sound Archives. Her works reside in the collections of the V&A and the Jerwood Collection.

 

For Taylor, drawing is a fundamental discipline of creative development a tool for encountering and examining the world, as well as a point of departure for identifying and understanding subject and content. Since the 1980s, her work has explored the relationship of the female subject both as artist and model through the defining acts of scrutiny, gaze, and feeling, often embodied through the practice of drawing.

 

Her paintings embrace expansive ideas of construction, context, and content, referencing historical precedents, narratives, and events. Informed by myths, stories, and histories, and through the reinterpretation of narratives featuring strong female protagonists, her work consciously reclaims the female subject from a female perspective. Multiple series of small ink drawings unfold and deepen these “herstories.” Narratives such as Tristan and Yseut are explored in conjunction with that of Marietta and the Unicorn, interpreting motifs and imagery from the ‘La Dame à la licorne’ tapestries housed in the Musée de Cluny (Musée National du Moyen Âge) in Paris. She also engages in pictorial and narrative investigations of Hercules and Deianira, inspired by a painting attributed to Gossaert in The Barber Institute (Birmingham, UK). These drawings generate readings of allegory, history, and contemporary events, forming a synthesis that distills content and prompts an exploration of human experience and relationships across time and place.

 

Her theatrical use of light, staging, and elements such as curtains and veils enhances the characterization of subjects, revealing or concealing pivotal moments within relationships or sequences of events. Ever aware of witnesses both outside and within the depicted scenes her work consistently interrogates the role of the observer. ‘Moonrakers’ (2024) took shape during the global pandemic, conveying an initial sense of helplessness in “looking on” as events unfolded, suspended in time and partly obscured from view. Reflecting the fragility of human experience, this moonlit scene evokes displacement between arrival and departure, reality and fiction, memory and forgetting.

 

She also participated in the group exhibition ‘When Is Now?’, organized by Vision Art Platform and held in London.