Figurehead sculpture in process. A massive bas-relief sculpture commissioned by Uptown Saint John Inc. to surround the Saint John Market clock on the outside back wall.
Photo : Peter Walsh.

Marie Koehler-Vandergraaf

It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can seriously begin to talk of universal culture Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, Carol Taylor is one of the dozens of Atlantic Canada women artists who, in March 1982 made the pilgrimage to Montreal to see The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. Some of us were so impoverished and so involved with family and economic respon- sibilities that being there at all was a su- preme occasion in our lives.

The lesson of The Dinner Party was that making art out of our deepest lives was the only possible path for us as artists; for some of us it would be years before we found the courage to be true to our artistic vision, a vision weighted towards content and mean- ing; for some, it would be years before we found the medium with which to do it. With the completion of her Ageratos cycle, Carol Taylor has come to the end of a two decade investigation of the meaning of "woman". For Taylor, this investigation implies "man " because of her direct experience as daughter, sister, wife, lover and mother. The exhibition for which this catalogue is designed, Ageratos Complete, work created from 1990 to 1994, presents a sequence - by no means smoothly continuous - of images centered on contemporary female issues of biological determinism and autonomy during the last half of the twentieth century.

Her present monumental work represents a gradual shedding of forms and materials that are barriers to direct expression; a superb draughtswoman, Taylor has released the need to make' 'perfect', drawings or watercolours (her Beginning series, surrealistically portraying women sheathed in mushroom forms and associated with nature and the natural world), has submerged her knowledge of the external body, has relinquished the poetic or expressive poses by which "woman " has been signified (her Awakening series of lifesize gestural drawings).

"Woman", as sign, symbol or mental and social construct, has in the past been defined and created by the powerful in each society for (mostly ) male needs. The historical images we have received of women are almost all created by men, both by those who painted, sculpted or poeticized the images and those who preserved them by commissioning or purchasing them, by writing about them or by choosing them for art galleries and museums.

Over several centuries, the weight of this process of selection tends to crush women's portrayals of themselves. The gradual emergence during the past twenty years of an understanding of the process by which some art (mostly male and often using "woman" as subject) is preserved and enabled to enter "art history", while the re- mainder of art production is prevented from doing so, has been one of the factors which now make it possible for women to persist in making art.

Artists now middle-aged have matured as beneficiaries of the feminist coming-to-consciousness; our work often parallels and reflects the great questions of our times. We absorb our culture's tides and influences and re-create them as meaning. During the last decade Carol Taylor's work has, frequently subconsciously, reflected theoretical issues of representation, cultural appropriation and use of non-traditional materials, while grappling with the experiences of cultural loss (the old values of maternity and fertility) , personal change (sexuality, self-valuation and aging) spirituality (creating a meaningful framework for one's life).

Taylor has borrowed from archaeological images, has admired the expressions of nu- merous living aboriginal cultures and adapted them to her own vision, has rep- resented women's bodies at a time when theoretical feminists were unable to justify that representation and has created, out of the heaviest materials, a body of work that praises the living spirit. Although critics have connected her work to goddess-worship and the feminist historical revision of matriarchal cultures, her work is more directly about modern woman's place in the world and our dilemma, which all woman - old, young, lesbian, childless - do by virtue of our periodicity, our not quite controllable bodies) we become sucked into ancient pattern of self-abnegation,silence and the struggle against dominance and dependence.

In 1982 Taylor began a series of black and white gestural figure drawings which devel- oped into rich oil and chalk pastel works; as her scribbled strokes focussed more intensely on volume than contour, she began to think sculpturally. At the same time she was applying to expressive forms the skills she had learned as a potter. Eventually, the energy that charges the gestural drawings became the gouged and textured clay of Ageratos, but not before she reiterated in clay the realistic depictions of women she had first presented in watercolour.

The Nurturing Circle of 1987 (an installation including an unwrapping and naming ceremony) is a transitional work, whose gestural drawings and life size clay figures both look back upon her representative years and prefigure the expressive use of clay in the Ageratos works. Taylor unwrapped each figure and named the sources of female strength in her own life... sister- woman, daughter-woman... allowing her audience to enter her experience.

In the same year she began making small clay figures, at first as ornaments, later as elements in a group of constructions like hunter's trophies - small boxy frames incorporating male/female symbols. The backgrounds were ripped up pastel drawings of women; in front of each hangs an element of the natural world, such as a snake or wreath, with a prehistoric dangly form, or fetish, to tantalize it. Taylor's studio is littered with suggestive debris...small coils squeezed and incised, tiny clay bones, sun heads with radiating holes, collections of discarded cup handles and cracked, glazed shards, bits of clay resembling tiny dolls or fetuses-which is incorporated into ongoing work.

Access to her work is visceral; her use of clay - gouging, incising, imprinting, leaving sharp little points and waves, burnished or smooth with slick glazes ...requires the viewer to feel first, then rationalize.

All of Taylor's work uses the female body. The body is the self - archaeologic, primitive, historic, personal and present - and the experience- of maternity and nurturing, sexual joy and endurance, and of being silenced, oppressed, revered, hated, ignored . It is also the spirit. Woman as reproductive body is the image Taylor most often uses in the Ageratos cycle.

Four Brides of Silence (1990) is Taylor's first work using fired clay to form the human figure on a painted ground. The female forms are flattened, somewhat platter like, shattered, with perforations around the edges; the artist perforated the clay in order to nail the shapes to their mounting board. It remains a very painful piece to view; the women are cracked, without arms and legs, with enormous genitalia and vari- ously inscribed wombs; the nail-holding borders around each figure isolate her (as if she were in the grotto forms of the later Life Singers) and give her a halo of light. The second figure from the left has a smudged face, eyes open, mouth open, crying out, silenced by clay; this face is repeated in many other pieces and, to me, represents the artist's mind and spirit.

Developing later from Four Brides is The Vanishing Women #I (five black figures) and #2 ,three white fired clay figures swaddled in cloth patterns, their faces rudimentary and woeful, their bodies seeming to sink into the ashy striations, flattened, their bodies perforated but not nailed, on a dark brown ground, brown clay arches appear above their heads. They are Indian women burned on the pyres of their husbands. In Brown Bird Pillars, four figures, heavily textured with scooping gestures that resemble feathers, stand in a row with their noses and mouths covered like Muslim women, eyes wary, a breast or womb suggested.

In 1990, Taylor completed Guardians, a painted triptych of three larger than lifesize figures which appear to connect Taylor herself to Aboriginal Canadian and African cultures. The figures are seated, composed of upsidedown heart shapes, heads at the points, cowled and shawled. (The use of a cowl, arch or halo shape will be repeated over the next four years. ) The bottom lobes of the hearts can be read as enormous breasts from which, in the central figure, clay fetishes, feathers, bones and shells hang; to me, this is the figure from whom the white and black companion figures gain strength, the figure of the present.

The viewer needs to address the issue of cultural appropriation in Taylor's work; she has borrowed themes, artifacts and images from every culture she has met, ancient and modern. I believe, however, that she uses these images as mnemonic tools and unifying motifs to remind us that we are flesh, and flesh with a history; at no point does she take over an idea and use it as if she were it's originator or cultural heir.

Some of the works on paper and her previous small drawings -Wisdom facing East and Bride Spirits, for example - employ the figures as columns, each figure a slight variation on the theme, each work as a whole bearing witness both to the sacrificial function of the body and the injustice of imprisonment. These works can be seen, among other readings, as enshrining women in their reproductive roles and insisting that women are literally the pillars of society. Other drawings are "containers", placing women forms in vase-like shapes and decorating them with buttons and incised patterns.

Spirit Pillars, a diptych of 1992/93 in which one side is the negative of the other, places a hollowed out or empty woman-shape within a clay shrine-like form; her faceless head, breasts and womb appear in relief. Beside her a Virgin twin, draped, but with womb, breasts and delicately modelled face apparent, glazed with turquoise. It is a powerful reminder that ancient archetypes lurk behind our everyday lives; in a poorer land, without literacy and without methods of birth control they remember that biology is destiny.

Life Singers is an immense five-part work presenting single figures under heavy clay arches, or within grottos of earth deeply cracked, fissured, textured through time and use. To be in its presence is to feel profound grief for all the women of the world buried in the clay of tradition, their mouths stopped with earth, their armless and legless bodies hidden, their breasts and wombs always available. But one feels hope, for their bodies are singing, they are shining through, and the central figure is a crone with arms who stares at us with her mouth open. These five figures, seen in a row, rest on heavy clay ledges or bands, the story of the earth, inscribed with insects, flowers, and leaves; beneath the bands are cuneiform messages relating to the piece; for instance, the first figure, very rudimentary, mouth covered with a veil is accompanied by a snakeshaped casting. This group of works should not be read as a heirarchy or a developmental line, but as an agglomeration of possibili- ties and histories.

The separate pillar works of 1993 seem to me to state that the reproductive years are over. Earth-Water Guardian is a two-paneled pillar whose womb has been sev- ered in half. The interior space is full of energy and life, and is surrounded by en- ergy particles or sperm-like shapes and the face views us directly. Broken Pillar in three parts, with the womb cut in half and head separate from the body, is a title suggesting damage, but the very realistically rendered face, eyes closed, and the tree like shape of the pillar as a whole suggests inner strength, composure and growth as well as age. An additional pillar work of 1993, Black Guardian, presents a small buried figure, pressed down by an inverted arch of clay, compressed by clay walls on either side, her abdomen a glowing spiral, radiant in the earth and her face wistful, or perhaps expectant, she maybe the element of fecundity in all of us.

Taylor's latest works, titled New Guardian and Final Guardian, are like many of the other figures of women, paired pillars, one black, one white, suggesting a completion of this cycle and a new image of the meaning of "woman". New guardian has arms to act and legs to walk; both are cruciform figures and are foregrounded and modelled in clay. They have stepped out of the grotto with open mouths and open eyes.

For the last six months Carol Taylor has been constructing Figurehead, a massive bas relief sculpture commissioned by Uptown saint John Inc. to surround the Saint John City Market Clock on the outside back wall. Figurehead is an outgrowth of ten stunning small clay pieces titled Daedalus' Daughter (#1 through #10). All present the moon or face swept to the right of the framework by massive wings scooped, sculptured and fired in ten different colours and ten different styles of feather. Daedalus' Daughter soars with the desire to know, in fact has risen from the clay.