Roslyn Rosenfeld -1990
Curator's Statement

Carol Taylor has spent much of her artistic life considering what it means to be a woman. The most recent works...the Ageratos series showing concurrently at gallery Connexion - are a distillation of essential female attributes embodies in the form of primitive goddesses. Along the way Taylor has looked at woman from many vantage points - within nature, within the home, and in her relationship to men - but increasingly in her own terms. Her exploration of artistic medium and handling took place concurrently.

As the name implies, Towards Ageratos is a related exhibition. It gives the viewer the opportunity to explore Taylor's process of evolution resulting in the mature statement - both artistic and philosophic - achieved in Ageratos. As curator I have tried to make its stages, its chronology, accessible. At the same time I felt it necessary to avoid interpretation as much as possible. The questions Carol Taylor raises are there for every viewer to consider.

If "ageless" (in Greek "ageratos") describes Taylor's recent series of female fertility figures, it could equally well to her numerous studies of gnarled and massive tree trunks done in the mid-70's. Their ability to survive the vicissitudes of time would seem the common link. They also suggest the tree of life. The bond with nature is strong.

Taylor's earliest figures appear surrealistically inscribed within unavoidably phallic mushroom shapes and set within landscapes of woods and streams. The sexuality of their theme is clearly rooted in nature. Within the enigmatic Beginning the only object not of nature is a four-sided object clearly of man's making. The delicate line drawing My Friends And I, the artist's own face is faintly visible among her house plants. Such works seem meditations upon woman's identity within her sexual and biological role.

Taylor's investigations continued in sets of drawings, rather than painting. While drawing was a ready vehicle for exploration- she had been throughly schooled in it by both Ted Campbell and Fred Ross - she struggled to make it into something more expressive.

Three ink drawings from 1981 ( part of a series shown at l'Université de Moncton) are traditional in approach though not in theme. Dependent upon contour line and in some cases hatched sharing, they include more nudes within enclosing shapes. Nudes in domestic settings, significantly by windows. Nudes holding masks. They state some very basic female dilemmas.

1982 brought a breakthrough in technique. Briefly Taylor set aside her question to focus on the medium itself. Her drawings of that time are studies of the bod - parts of it rather the whole things. In UNB's own collection is a study of a thigh done in bold firm strokes of charcoal. Even more significant in terms of her later work were the studies done in a broad scrubbily fashion avoiding contour line although. As she wrote later, she had been
      Clinging to line
      When I found it not quite enough
      Using line
      When it failed to convey
      The new energy and confidence I felt.
      Because
      I still thought it was the correct way to draw..

Figure#8, also from the UNB Collection, shows how effective Taylor's new approach was, especially when combined with colour. The gestural energy of it's movement gave a new, more highly charged, nature to her drawings. Pastel, whether oil pastel or chalk pastel, now became her medium of preference.

Newly armed, Taylor returned to her philosophic preoccupations. In the next several years she did many female figure studies in pastel. Left behind was any sense of the particular woman. Of significance was the 1985 series which Taylor destroyed, then reassembled to find they had achieved a kind of mystic power. She gave them the names of primitive goddesses.

For Taylor, the ancient goddesses symbolized the whole concept of female fertility and creativity in it's broadest sense. They liberated/sparked in the artist a great burst of creative energy that produced first the large installation of sculpture , drawings and assemblage called The Nurturing Circle (shown at Windrush Gallery in 1987 and Galerie Sans Nom in 1990) and then Ageratos.

It is revealing that Taylor called one of her "torn drawings" Aruru (the Potter) after the Babylonian earth goddess who helped to create the human race from clay, as her own first works in this series were monumental fertility figures in fired clay. A smaller version is included in this show.

Their counterpart among the drawings is seen in Venus Resting which has a faint echo of Miller Britain's exultant maternal figures, also done in pastel. As Taylor neared her goal, her powers broadened. The figures became more and more elemental and their expression took innovative forms. The geometric motifs of Fertility Image #2 and #5 use female symbols within their quilt patterns that Taylor associates with her own mother and grandmother. They also incorporate actual stitchery. The enclosing shapes of this late series recall those of her earliest paintings, though their gender may ( and may not) have changed.

The ritualistic power present in all these varied forms id especially evident in the small boxed assemblages containing fetish objects.

These works of The Nurturing Circle - and even more of Ageratos - show Taylor questioning the archetypal nature of woman. It is a substantially different focus from the much more personal musings of 1981 and different again from those of the mid0-70's. They offer a remarkable insight into the evolution of a woman's consciousness.

Roslyn Rosenfeld: arts writer and independant curator active in New Brunswick over the past fifteen years.