Shannon Taylor, a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, with a major in Media Arts (2002). She lives and works in Peterborough Ontario, where she maintains a studio practice, and shows her work frequently. Her studio is open to the public by appointment.
In her artistic practice, she utilises various methods of representation and record-making. These methods include drawing, print-making, painting, photography, and video/audio recording. She has an interest in pattern and surface design and has painted a number of decorative murals in the downtown core of Peterborough and outlying neighbourhoods.
Shannon’s work is driven by a love of nature and enjoyment of the contemplative and experimental processes used to create visual art.
We are participants in and a part of the physical world we inhabit. Over time, we have lost that sense of connection, have all too often let ourselves be severed from the world of which we are a part. My work expresses my fear of a lost connection with each other, with our environment and a hope that we will re-discover all our forms of connection.
In my work I am going for a subjective idea of time, place and history. Since they are all composite images of drawings paintings and photographs, there is automatically an element of nostalgia there, (pictures are from/of the past). I combine them to make new images, so I like to look at the whole body of this work as an illustrated journey. A window into a realm made out of bits of my personal history, edited and composed by myself. This makes the ‘reality’ more accurate in one sense, since it is more subjective and speaks something of my experience and culture, and less accurate in the another sense, since the images are fabricated, and the places do not actually exist outside of the work.
The images resulting from this process have often been described as familiar and nostalgic, as well as stark and mysterious, lending themselves to the idea of postcards, vintage photographs and memory. I like these associations as many of my source images have been taken while traveling, and the people I am portraying are often far away. Memory plays a part in both instances, as do the ideas of distance and travel which also lend themselves to an air of mystery.
One important aspect of memory is that it necessarily includes some elements of fiction, and often represents something of the person who remembers, based on what is remembered or focused on versus what is forgotten. The familiarity of the postcard, and the idea of a snapshot into someone’s experience that a postcard often is, and the mysterious nature of the vintage photograph seem to resonate with the ideas of time, place and memory driving this recent body of work.
In my work I am going for a subjective idea of time, place and history. Since they are all composite images of drawings paintings and photographs, there is automatically an element of nostalgia there, (pictures are from/of the past). I combine them to make new images, so I like to look at the whole body of this work as an illustrated journey. A window into a realm made out of bits of my personal history, edited and composed by myself. This makes the ‘reality’ more accurate in one sense, since it is more subjective and speaks something of my experience and culture, and less accurate in the another sense, since the images are fabricated, and the places do not actually exist outside of the work.
Find her online at shannontaylor.ca or
