My work is informed by the everyday and the archive. I use photography to create collections that act as an autobiographical narrative. The photographs tell the story of a life as revealed through the overlooked moments of daily routine and the physical traces left by the unconscious. These forgotten experiences form a key element to my work and provide an insight into the self, as well invoke a platform from which the narrative is formed.
I am an obsessive collector.
My ‘Beds’ project started when I discovered how interesting the covers looked when I woke up in a hotel. I decided to photograph every bed I slept in while away from home, to see how and if they changed. Each one was different, and told a different story about the unconscious life I left behind. This project, which I started in 2002, has no end, as it is a collection that can never be fulfilled. For contrast, I photographed my home bed for a month. Each photo was the same.
I became aware of the power of ephemera when I discovered, while looking through an old book, a picture my daughter had drawn for me that I had used as a bookmark. The picture, when seen alongside the title, created a tension in which a new narrative was formed. This narrative represented a truer self-portrait, and I began looking through other books, finding more and more insights into the self. I created a body of work around this, ‘Bookmarks’ in 2009. Each item was titled using the title of the book on a post-it note, together which was photographed as if discovered in the archive.
My current project, ‘Handbag’, is inspired by Andy Warhol’s project ‘Time Capsules’. It involves the collecting and cataloguing of the non-essential items from my handbag over the course of the year. The ephemera will be photographed and archived, and with the catalogue, will create a window into my experience of 2012. I have started photographing the items, and plan to exhibit these as part of Brighton Photo Fringe in October 2012.
I have a BA (Hons) Editorial Photography and MA Photography from University of Brighton, UK. My photographs have been exhibited in Brighton, London, New York, Barcelona, and Majorca and are owned by private collectors.
Barbara Taylor’s work, though also concerned with archives, is more domestic and quietly personal, a series of bookworks that archive her personal life from a variety of different perspectives – all the bookmarks in her library, all the beds she has slept in, all the views from her kitchen window over a period of a year. Each of these books not only tells a story – but reveals the starting points for many other stories potentially nesting within it through a series of very simple strategies Taylor reveals the complex web of experiences that make up a life, a richness that is dormant with in the everyday, produced through an obsessive process of recording and ordering and re-ordering.
– Joanna Lowry 2010
Links:
Website: http://barbara-taylor.org.uk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/girlb
Tumblr: http://girlb.tumblr.com
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