Painting (MA)
Safira Taylor
Safira Taylor (b.1993, Muscat, Oman) is currently based in London and Amsterdam. She received her BA from Academie Minerva (Groningen, the Netherlands) in 2017. Recent exhibitions include: Final, not Over: Open Fields at Unit 1 Gallery (London, 2020); True Essentials at No Man's Art Gallery (Amsterdam, 2020); Up, Up and Away at RCA Hockney Gallery (London, 2020); Artworks Open at the Barbican Arts Group Trust (London, 2019); Influencing the Influencer at Torch Gallery (Amsterdam, 2019); Nescafe Azera x Timeout London at the Truman Brewery (London, 2019); and We Can Only Have Fun on Certain Days at Stour Space (London, 2019). Safira recieved funding from Het Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds for her MA at the Royal College of Art.
Safira relates her relationship with her practice to nature's symbiotic relationships, and her process to cycles found in the natural environment, particularly rewilded or wild environments, where without human intervention the flywheel of nature's ecosystems cultivate diversity to thrive harmoniously.
We are holding hands.
Our grip: firmly eternal. We move with the stability of mutualism.
Our feet: running. I stumble, but you pull me upright. Right over left, left over right, we continue, face to face, round and round. With moments of commensalism. External matter continuously enters our circle, filtering in and out of our porous bodies. It leaves our meatus bulging with phlegm and causes acidic saliva to pool in our buccal mucosae. We swallow, we spit, we pick, we flick.
And parasitism.I wipe the gathering of rheum from your lacrimal caruncle using my finger. I wrestle with your form using the weight of my body. I tear at your skin, peeling off layers from your abdominal cavity. Constructing histolysis: a regeneration dependent on destruction. Constructing your constructive deconstruction.
You constantly challenge my decision-making, manipulating my analytical thought process with your evolving material and form. Together, we push our language of abstraction beyond the instinctual sum of our external influences to a more enigmatic exploration of You. For You.
Face to face, round and round.
We are holding hands.
