Sian Taylor
MA Illustration - Camberwell, 2022
Siân Taylor’s practice looks to push the relationship between distortion and legibility to communicate a uniquely articulated perspective on various scenarios. It is relative to her perspective on average daily events, as routine as catching a train or preparing for a night out. Her collection represents snippets of wider narratives, distorted in such a way that emphasises their key visual components. She works traditionally on paper with pen and alcohol marker before adjusting her work digitally.
Taylor looks to play with the dynamics of unexpected, awkward moments of intimacy between strangers and friends alike in her illustrations, within the compositions themselves whilst also actively involving viewers directly as onlookers and contributors to the energy of the relations depicted. She uses the exaggeration of unusual perspectives as a means of alluding to points of interest, as dictated subconsciously by the natural path of the eye.
In depicting a subject, Taylor consciously highlights areas of high interest through centring them as points of energy in her work which thus effect how the rest of the illustration is portrayed and understood. In doing so, what she dictates to be intuitively important is highlighted through maximisation, minimisation, and the resulting lines of action, her unique visual language including the degree of distortion and quality of the linework providing another layer to the interpretation of the image additional to the scene of events being communicated. With a passion to depict the mundane and people’s everyday eccentricities which lie within the average, Taylor possesses skill in finding and exaggerating awkward points of interest to form visually unexpected yet intriguing scenes.
Instagram: @siantaylor.art
"I love to observe people and their well-established habits, and the tensions that arise from the clashing together of non- cohesive personal routines. These small moments interest me as bases for illustrations- a person pushing a pull door, dropping their wallet, etc always causes disruption to the preconceived ‘script’ and leave room for fun interpretations. For example, Tube Sippin was heavily informed by my daily sketches on the Underground, where I frequently ‘watch’ people ‘watching’ others, and Mansplain came from an actual date I observed at an Italian restaurant."
