GEMMA TAYLOR

1985, London.

A visual artist interested in expressing the spiritual dimension through painting.

For 10 years she worked in creative arts therapy and journalism while attending courses at the London Atelier of Representational Art. In 2019 she moved to Florence to complete her Master’s in Visual Arts at the Accademia D’Arte AD’A.

Her influences have come from psychedelics and meditation. She is currently moving to Berlin for a six-month art residency.

I am trying to get away from the left-brain cerebral ideas that are rationally thought out. The instruction to paint this came to me while meditating. It is answering the question, ‘what is in the heart’? By focusing on my heart and seeing what comes out in an intuitive automatic way, I am trying to bypass the rational mind and uncover what is in the unconscious heart brain.

In this recent pictorial series, Gemma Taylor lets forms, colours and their composition flow freely, trying to express the emotional part of our intelligence, the same part that in normalcy we retain through the control of rational intelligence. In this sense Portal indicates an opening – corresponding precisely to the surface of the painting – beyond which we enter an area of sensitivity outside direct control (with respect to which meditation practices are not extraneous): the representation, which although we could refer to abstraction, differs from the traditional modes, revealing an appearance close to the images of our time, with possible references to digital graphics.