Marion Taylor

“Inspired by the line in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’, my work developed during lockdown. It seemed very fitting to express the ideas around the contrasts of light and dark, hope and despair, the journeys of damage to repair, the resilience of the human spirit, required a form. Cohen’s words went straight to the essence of these emotions, needing one element to access the other. White light is made up of all the colours. In darkness the colours cannot be perceived until light shines upon them.

The series is a divergence, in some respects, from my expressive paint-handling and the layering of my previous work. Here I have stripped things back to emphasise the content of the painting. This work is more simple, though strong in its imagery. I am concerned with motifs and the concepts, as well as the physical progress of the painting.”

Marion E Taylor has lived and worked as an artist in Penwith for 30 years. Her practice over that time has included painting, drawing, printing, photopaintings, 3D installation and site-specific work. It is often a material-based process, or combination of processes, that stimulates her explorations, but the approach is conceptual.

The imagery holds many contrasts and contradictions – dark / light, real / surreal, observed / imagined, representational / abstracted – and in this way questions ideas around these conventions. The concepts are often based around the threats that our consumer society poses for the planet.

Taylor works from one of the Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives, has exhibited widely in the UK and is a highly respected figure in West Cornwall’s Art scene. She was chair of Newlyn Society of Artists and was very involved with the education programme at Newlyn Gallery and the Exchange. Taylor has given lectures and held seminars at University of Falmouth. She is a course tutor at the School of Painting, based in the same Borlase Smart studios on Porthmeor Beach as her own studio.