Saturday 15 January 2011

Sam Taylor-Wood - Escape Artist (Green and Red)

Sam Taylor-Wood (born March 4, 1967) is an English film maker, photographer and conceptual artist, with close ties to some of the main figures in the Brit-Art movement. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. There are several strands to Taylor-Wood’s work, one of which has explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support. Escape Artist (Green and Red) is a new print in this series produced for Counter Editions, a light jet digital c-type print on Fuji Crystal archive paper, 56.2x82 cm, signed and numbered by the artist on the reverse in an edition of 175. The introductory price of £550 is very good value for an image of this size. Retailing £850 as of April 2012.

“This photograph shows the artist suspended mid-air from brightly coloured helium balloons. "I have to hide my face in the pictures. It is a combination of hiding the grimacing pain - because I think that destroys the photograph - but it is also because I don't think you need to see my face." She said the pain was necessary as the photographs were a response to her fight against cancer. "I made them shortly after I was no longer referring to myself as an ill person," she said. "There is a definite sense of physical freedom from the constraints of illness”. Indeed, there is an air of the escape artist, of the magician, to these works. The artist does seem to be performing a miraculous act of levitation. The balloons surely aren’t enough to stop her slumped descent to the hard ground below. And so what is holding her up? Perhaps nothing less than an act of faith.“