Emilie Taylor: Beating the Bounds at Bosse & Baum, London

23 NOVEMBER 2018 BY CHRISTINE TAKENGNY

For her first solo-show in London, Sheffield-based artist Emilie Taylor has created a new body of work at Bosse & Baum that explores the maternal subject in the urban landscape. The theme is closely linked to the artist’s own experience of the inherent transformations – and spatial limitations – that come with motherhood.

For this exhibition, Taylor has developed two different strands of objects: A series of elevated, torso-like vases displayed on tall plinths; and two abstract looking dome forms that are placed on lower grounded plinths. In her practice Taylor often combines classical and contemporary narratives, and these forms are inspired by ancient Kuduru, engraved stone-blocks used by the Kassites of Ancient Mesopotamia to mark land grants or boundaries.

Both sets of ceramics show images of a new mother and an older woman, both aerial performers, with a cityscape of Victorian houses and council estates in the background. The artist met the younger acrobat in a playgroup that their children attend together and witnessed the first time she returned to the ropes since becoming a mother, performing with her post-birth body. Taylor observed the movements of the older and the younger women suspended on ropes and in mid-air, making sketches and photographs. She then transferred these onto the pots and boulders.

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