The affirmation of social class in the drawings of Sally Taylor

Abstract

Abstract The drawings of British artist Sally Taylor (1977) are composed of heads of various descriptions; blockheads, confused heads, hysterical heads, heads with mouths and heads without, heads full of menace and heads full of glee. The pressure of these recurring motifs, which emerge from as many as 200 drawings a day, mark out Taylor’s practice as an active negotiation of repetition and difference. Norman Bryson famously characterized drawing as an act that resists the finality of the image to instead suspend a moment of ‘becoming’ (Bryson 2010: 150). The nuanced consistency of Taylor’s prolific output exemplifies Bryson’s understanding of the medium. What interests me here, however, are the performative aesthetic and material operations that make these drawings call to one another and their audience. The aim of this article is to consider the inextricable relationship between form and content in the works Taylor exhibited in That Head That Head at the Rabley Drawing Centre, Wiltshire (26 September – 29 October 2016). To do so, I argue, is to situate their aesthetic as a negotiation and transformation of the social politics of making art in the Great Britain at the beginning in the twenty-first century.