Since moving to rural North Yorkshire, Sally Taylor’s work has begun to investigate the cognitive dissonance experienced in the natural environment and the sense of living through an image as opposed to engaging directly with the landscape through more meaningful, embodied experiences. SelfScapes offered opportunities to collaborate with colleagues at York St John University while reaching out to other practitioners across the UK. Prior to SelfScapes, Taylor’s work had been shown in predominantly ‘white cube’ spaces – it was this project that led to an emerging interest in sculptural processes that developed on from making small scale drawings in the studio.

Drawn motifs become ‘blockages or openings’ with geometric shapes, pebbles, boulders, speech bubbles, clouds, apertures and clearings. The ‘Head’ drawings become environments, with the ground emerging as a stage to ‘play out’ a sense of self and lived experience. The objects gathered while walking in Dalby have been used to inform the drawings, either by recording their form and translating this into drawings, or by using the objects as items to collage into the works on paper, as an attempt to directly resolve the ‘dissonance’ between the environment and the image.