Developing an Aesthetics of the In-between
What is the Mound?
On the studio wall, there is a list of words describing what the Mound is, and what it is not. In a tangle, an object lies in the corner. It is made of thin bendy plastic pipes, copper wires and scraps of material. This is one of the ways that the Mound project has taken physical shape over these past months, alongside videos of the artist inside and outdoors, writings, and a substantial collection of objects (natural and manmade) that have been collected over the years, on beaches, hillsides, in houses and the home. The tangled mound object was developed in partnership with another artist, ostensibly as a costume, and despite its sculptural form it does not function as an object for contemplation. Rather, it is a physical manifestation of a process, the end product of which might be a text, or a piece of sound, or a script for a performance.
In a series of diagrams, Anna Taylor asks the question: what is the Mound? Following what she terms something akin to an investigative process, lasting the duration of a twelve month period facilitated by an Arts Council DYCP grant, she is a little closer to the answer. There is a sense that the project is located somehow between these things, constructed of and in the spaces and relationships between them. Inherent to the Mound is a tension between things, what Taylor describes as something like the force of repulsion between two magnets, a resistance between two objects that puts them in relation to one another.[1] These qualities are also visible in her photographs, and the works combining image and text.
The sense of ‘in-between’, of a back-and-forth between two binaries is a helpful way into Taylor’s work, and writing this text, ostensibly with the goal of connecting the Mound to her earlier Backburner project, I have found myself wresting with whether to conform to the structuring force of binaries or undermine them. But rather than thinking of opposites, it is more helpful to allow for a fluid relationship between objects as doubles or twins, sometimes in opposition and sometimes aligned. The relationship between childhood and motherhood, and between our inner worlds and social selves are thus folded into one another; the relationship between work and biography becomes similarly unstable. Taylor’s work is located in this back and forth.
On the Backburner
In an open-fronted black shed, materials were laid out on a table - paper, a box of scissors and glue sticks. Out in the alleyway, there were trays of clay on the ground. Someone (a sound engineer and dj cum community orchard enthusiast) was helping out by rigging up microphones in the shed corners, to pick up ambient sound and the trailing and looping ends of sentences as people conversed as they work. If you wandered into the yard, there was coffee and freshly baked buns straight out of the oven. Adults and children entered, stood and chatted, engaged with the materials as little or as much as they felt like. There was a publication to read, take away or ignore, also according to inclination.
This was the tacit invitation to engage orchestrated by Taylor in 2016, and it was at this event, the first Backburner social, that I first met her. The Backburner project, which ran from 2016-19, grew out of a period of time when intense care-giving to her three small children was the focus of Taylor’s daily life. It began with taking photographs and notes as a means of recording details of the small-town semi-rural/post-industrial landscape around her, the backdrop to her days spent “keeping the children safe”.[2] From these notes and photographs came the Backburner socials and accompanying publications: Movement and Suspension (2016), Fluid Forms (2017), The Well (2019) and Listen in Two (2019), which is also the title of an experimental sound piece developed for a commission by the Calderdale Sound Women’s Network.
Two things: The location in a shed was important. Borrowed from a neighbour, it served as a holding space between public and private. The open-ended nature of the event was equally significant. The materials laid out were an invitation to play. In one sense Backburner can be read in the context of work exploring the potential of using the domestic space as context for art production. (The generous nature of the invitation, with food and publications freely available also emphasised the non-transactional nature of what was happening there.) But unlike the work of feminist artists who used domestic objects as a means to critique patriarchal structures or draw attention to the drudgery and unacknowledged nature of domestic labour, the work itself here is not about motherhood or the family per se.[3]
Taylor’s work had evolved within the context of family life, but it is not about being a mother. Her experience of doing the work of a mother determined the conditions that her artistic work could happen in (and, indeed, offered the pockets of space and time to begin working artistically in the first place). It had to be created alongside other responsibilities, and was therefore often ephemeral; it needed to be able to live and potentially be displayed in a domestic setting. And while the work is neither for nor about her children, it does posit childhood as a fruitful source of inspiration and fertile ground for exploring issues of perception and existential enquiry. It takes childhood seriously, and connects with childhood’s most serious aspects, as well as its most joyful: intense sensory experiences, the paralysing dread of loss and death, and the indistinguishability of work and play.
Thus, the materials on offer at Backburner were often more of an invitation to stay-and-play than the more conventional studio setting: typical materials of childhood such as play dough, scissors and glue, but also slime (mixed from shaving foam, contact lens solution and PVA glue), sticky-back plastic and flour. The first flour mound was made at one of the Backburners, turned out of a ceramic pudding basin in 2016. Taylor preserved it precariously balanced on a kitchen tile, leaving it for a long time on the upstairs landing, and eventually transferring it into the studio. These fragile remnants, as much as the conversations and meetings that were facilitated by the socials, endured through the enforced pause of lockdowns, and would prove significant for the development of future work.
Mound/(Un)mound: subject to change
The groundwork laid down in those years was excavated to provide the materials for the 2022 exhibition Mound/(Un)mound, which took place at Imaginary Wines in Todmorden, and was accompanied by two texts reflecting on the Backburner work and the idea of the mound.[4] The back room was given over to an archival display of sorts, which featured images from the Backburner socials, and some traces of material play and activities that happened during the Sunday afternoon exhibition launch. These replicated Taylor’s habit of holding on to materials left over from walking and making sessions, which featured in an enumerated list occupying the connecting corridor between the front and back of the shop. These included such items as: ‘8. An oyster shell riddled with holes’ and ‘11. A cereal bowl lined with the residue from a crystal making experiment’, as well as ‘1. A tray lined with a sheet of greaseproof paper, a kitchen tile with a mound of flour on it.’ (aka The Mound).
In the main space, large giclee prints on paper bringing together photographs that Taylor had taken herself with fragments of text were positioned all the way around the room. There were also a number of found images, the status of which was not flagged, creating a degree of uncertainty of the status of all the photographs. This juxtaposition of photography and writing is very typical of Taylor’s binocular view of things, and the layout of the text alongside photographs recalled previous Backburner publications.
Taylor herself has identified the multi-register, pluri-vocal nature of her writing,[5] and the large-scale printed works featured fragments that could be read in isolation, as questions or descriptive statements, or else as belonging to a single narrative (“What I was seeing was unstable and prone to change.” - “Then we were inside it.”).[6] These recall the overlapping voices and mingling of narrative and description explored in her 2018 sound piece A Line Against Firs, where two speaking voices overlap as the unnamed characters are observed and experience the landscape around them (“A thread of saliva hangs from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it away distractedly.” “He waits for the receding of the night”) – as well as the performance piece for three voices developed alongside the exhibition, A Performative Talk (2022).
The instability of the self and the world around us is central to Taylor’s more recent work that has been developed under the heading of the Mound, the films The Flour Basin and The Valley (currently works in progress). Where previously, this has been explored principally through dialogic narrative voice (as in the works mentioned above), the pieces developed as part of the Mound seek to get into the cracks and crevices of the physical world, harking back to the encounters with physicality and materiality that were staged during the Backburner socials.[7]
A (counter)balancing act
The journey to recognising her own creative and investigative work as being artistic work has not been straightforward. Growing up, her childhood and adolescence were marked by the religious beliefs of her parents, who were leaders of an evangelical church in the post-industrial coastal East Anglian town of Lowestoft. These experiences included participation in spiritual practices such as full body immersion and the laying on of hands, and witnessing people being moved by the Holy Spirit to weep and fall to the floor. They can be posited as an important touchstone for the focus in her work on invisible forces that shape the world and cannot always be seen, but are often intuited or experienced bodily.
Taylor describes the landscape of the area as equally important to this sense of the fundamental instability in the world. The Lowestoft Bascule Bridge, which carried the road connecting the two sides of the port town, could be swung open in order to allow large ships to pass through and down the canal. The memory of the road that just moments before lay ahead suddenly leading upwards into nothing is another touchstone image for the possibility of the world tipping away.[8] She also mentions coastal erosion and the aftermaths of landslides as other markers of this precarity.
Another key influence in the development of her work was the experience of M.E in her early twenties while working for a major art institution, which at the time disrupted her more conventional career pathway working as a curator.[9] This experience of a forced pause or step back, along with the later physical and emotional demands of having three children under the age of 3, led her to choose a move to the Calder valley and a different way of living and working. Again, this episode may be seen to speak to Taylor’s interest in the unreliability of the body, and suspicion of any straightforward labelling of identity, as the disorienting process of changing career paths, names and practising care for herself and others was, as she describes it, both destructive and generative at the same time.
Each of these experiences seem to have left their mark, enhancing Taylor’s ability to tune into the metaphysical forces that hold the world together. Her late Autism diagnosis offers another lens through which to approach her interest in processes of perception and embodied experiences, as well as her approach to research and production.[10]
The performative and the in-between
Looking, then, back to Backburner and forward to the current works that are emerging from the Mound, it’s possible to track a number of key shifts and developments in Taylor’s practice over the past five or so years. These include a shift in the relationship between performance and documentation, and the between process, object, and outcome. According to Taylor, for Backburner, the publications served as the beginning point: people were invited to interact with materials based on the ideas developed for and accessible through the publication. The CSWN performance also grew out of a Backburner text, and the performance was accompanied by a publication supplied to the audience present at The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge.
Whilst Taylor has written texts that are associated with the Mound – notably the text ‘Mound/(Un)mound’, distributed at the exhibition at Imaginary Wines, but also short texts and diagrams that are part of the investigative part of the research – this project is closer to the indexical aspect to her practice, previously evident in both the Circular Index (2020) and the displayed list from 2022, ‘On the Landing/Other Things Around the House (An Incomplete List)’. The accumulation of things, the naming of them, and the attempt to understand the relationships between them seems to perform an important function in itself, that is not revealed to the artist.
The aesthetics of the Mound emerged from the materials, words and images that trigger a certain feeling, or sense of something. There is also a sense that Taylor is circling around this feeling, as something behind her that can’t be looked at directly. It speaks to an art that foregrounds intuition and looking inwards. But it is also an art that believes in the power of naming, and the performative force of words, where speaking is enough to act upon the world. We are left in the push and pull in-between, towards definitive gestures and meanings, that prove illusive and illusory. The aesthetic strategies that recur through the work, of moving between modes of working, juxtaposing the like and the unlike, and the slippage between word and image, all seek to deepen our processes of perception, but also ultimately point to the limits of the sayable.
Text by Elizaveta Butakova
[1] “In-between shapes holding their own form, each static particle charged; matter drawn to matter.” Exhibition text accompanying ‘Mound/(Un)mound’, October-December 2022, Imaginary Wines.
[2] “I remember having little archive cards, leaning on the double-buggy handle bars, and writing notes about what I was seeing as we were walking. It was a really lovely way of connecting, but then I was writing down little things that the kids had said, or someone picking up a stick… It felt like they were innocently saying these things that felt like they were about everything. That was really moving, seeing them comprehending the world. The first time that they’re comprehending the idea of loss… that really moved me. When I look at my photographs of them, that’s what I see, impermanence and a lot of those ideas.” Interview with Anna Taylor, February 2023.
[3] How do we write about work made under the conditions of motherhood - shaped by it, but not defined by it, with motherhood as a context not a subject? The terms ‘mother’, and to a lesser degree, ‘the maternal’, in themselves can close off possibilities for plural meanings. That’s why reaching for terms like m/other feels necessary in this moment, much like womxn functions to crack open the possible meanings of the term woman, to signal an acceptance of the potentially unknown and unknowable inherent within it. This is pertinent in the context of the current long-overdue reevaluation of works by mothers and about m/othering, as seen in exhibitions such as “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” curated by Hettie Judah with Hayward Gallery Touring, Arnolfini, Bristol, March-May 2024.
[4] Imaginary Wines is a small non-profit project space that doubles as a natural wine shop, which I run with my partner. The curatorial invitation behind the programming is for artists to show work in progress, to take away the need for objects or thoughts to be complete or polished; exhibitions are accompanied by in-conversation events or performances that seek to further or deepen the artist’s understanding of their work through dialogue with the community of people who visit the shop, often artists, musicians or makers themselves.
[5] “I think I write to find out. I write to explore things. Something I’ve come to realise recently about my writing is that I write in so many different registers, which can be frustrating for a reader. It’s like a dialogue between lots of different components and times, it’s a way of gathering… I don’t feel like a singular voice when I’m writing.” Interview with Anna Taylor, February 2023.
[6] They were extracts from the longer texts accompanying the exhibition.
[7] “Flour is to do with the crumbling nature of the house [..] There’s an equivalence between flour, and playdough and plaster, and expanding foam… Things like that. Things that the house is made of. There’s almost a fragility to it, when you realise what’s under it. You imagine the house as a hermetically sealed safe space, but there’s so many gaps. That’s what’s beneath it, crumbly stuff that isn’t actually fixed to anything. There’s a connection between all of these things…” Interview with Anna Taylor, February 2023.
[8] See interview between EB and AT, March 2024.
[9] “I quite dramatically fell ill with M.E. and instantly couldn’t work or get out of bed. I had that for about a year, and that was an interesting year of coming to terms with not being able to do anything, and learning about things like active rest. When you’re lying down, you’re actually doing something… Coming to terms with various things during that year was significant, and gave me a different outlook on time and productivity. I learnt the limits of my body, in what was a horribly driven and productive work environment.“ Interview with Anna Taylor, February 2024.
[10] There is an important movement to document and explore the experiences of neurodiverse artists and the relationship between neurodiversity and art making: see, for example, ‘On Neurodiversity: A Study Room Guide on Neurodiversity’ compiled by Daniel Oliver for Live Art Development Agency (2019), available to download at https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Daniel_Oliver_Guide-2.pdf