Diana Taylor: A practice where research and materiality meet. Presented by What's My Thesis? in partnership with DON’T LOOK Projects

Diana Taylor: A practice where research and materiality meet. Presented by What's My Thesis? in partnership with DON’T LOOK Projects

In this illuminating live conversation recorded at DON’T LOOK Projects, UK-based artist Diana Taylor joins host Javier Proenza (What’s My Thesis?) for a deeply textured discussion around her first solo show in the United States, Flotsam and Jetsam. Organized by DON’T LOOK Projects in association with SLQS Gallery in London, the exhibition draws on Taylor’s research-intensive practice, exploring time through the fusion of research and materiality. Her work employs a remix logic, echoing Sigmar Polke's 1980s period.

Currently in a short-term fellowship at The Huntington, Taylor speaks about her practice-based research. Her PhD was in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, where she focused on how historical craft, screen-printing, and reproducibility inform her contemporary approach to painting. With roots in both rural Wiltshire and Cyprus, Taylor's early exposure to English landscape painting, tapestry, and devotional patternwork creates a foundation for her ongoing material inquiries into time, collapse, and visual culture.

The conversation explores:

• Taylor’s use of screenprinting on raw and repurposed canvas as a method of layering digital and analog imagery
• The influence of William Morris, The Divine Comedy by Gustav Doré, Sigmar Polke and 1970s suburban interiors on her visual lexicon
• A meditation on contemporaneity—the feeling of living amidst overlapping temporalities in the age of the internet
• The metaphor of Flotsam and Jetsam as a conceptual frame for image overload, cultural debris, and the residue of civilization
• Her experimental use of digital tools—zooming, pixelation, low-res 3D scanning—not to perfect, but to fail productively.
• Collapsing binaries: nature and culture, craft and tech, chaos and control, digital noise and sacred relic

Also discussed is Taylor’s current work at The Huntington, where she’s engaging with historical plant taxonomies, rare botanical prints, and Morris’s medieval utopian socialism to produce a new body of work and a forthcoming article in The Journal of William Morris Studies.

Flotsam and Jetsam is on view at DON’T LOOK Projects through August 30, 2025. Please email [e-mail] to schedule a private viewing.

Listen to this episode to uncover:

• Why Taylor considers pixelation and printed crochet as relics of maternal labor and digital memory
• How screenprinting becomes a form of archaeological gesture
• The relationship between digital overstimulation and visual stillness
• Why artists might choose ruin, repetition, or failure as aesthetic strategies in a culture obsessed with optimization

Featured Institutions & Collaborators: The Huntington Library, William Morris Gallery, DON’T LOOK Projects, SLQS Gallery, What’s My Thesis?

Episode Credits: Hosted by Javier Proenza Guest: Diana Taylor Presented by DON’T LOOK Projects Podcast: What’s My Thesis?

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🎧 Listen now and step into the layered, fragmented, hyper-contemporary world of Diana Taylor. 📍 Flotsam and Jetsam runs through August 30 at DON’T LOOK Projects, Los Angeles in association with SLQS Gallery in London. 🔗 Follow Diana on Instagram and learn more at dontlookprojects.com

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