Diana Taylor graduated with an M.F.A Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2010. She studied B.A (Hons) Fine Art at Bath Spa University College and graduated in 1999. In 2011 she was awarded the Abbey Scholarship in Painting at the British School at Rome. Residencies in 2011 and 2012 include Centre of Contemporary Arts, Andratx, Mallorca and East London Printmakers. A sense of journey, both physically and through memory, and the relation this has with mass-produced images, which travel our own consciousness, are central to my practice. Set within the shifting, crumbling landscape, these images, like ruins, become remnants of our past, falling through time and constantly replacing one another. The ruin embodies a sense of absence; they speak of the past and of the present, always changing with memory. The notion of failure and the doubt that it invokes in us seems increasingly resonant in our world. Our fallible nature as human beings is perhaps most explicitly exemplified in our recollection of the past and the verisimilitude of memory. An all-pervading feeling of the Internet’s generic, throw away stock images and clip art in relation to the decline of print and published materials are central to my preoccupation with notions of time and loss. These ideas are explored through a combination of data from digital and analogue realms with painting, screen-printing, traditional craft patterns and needlework, on canvas and directly onto the walls. The fallen landscape: rocks, rubble and ruin, serve as backdrop of a collapsed milieu. Intrinsic to my practice is the process of erasure or ‘un-painting’: the destruction and abstraction of ornament and architectural decay as a direct result of nature, forming new meanings in the reconfigurations of fragments. Littered surfaces create tensions between languages and layers, culled from what appear to be cosy and domestic... folds of drapery, architectural embellishments, frills of doilies, alphabet samplers, ornamental frames and borders, in opaque and translucent layers, caught up with recognizable objects, yet half described and obscured by gestural washes and scribbles. Spills, drips and crossings out interrupt the flow and order. In rendering the laborious elements of the painting, a sense of futility resides. This is the point where things collapse, opening up an emotional space shaped by alphabets of lost times: like contemporary life, things are falling apart, toppling from their position and becoming unsettled. Diana’s Jealous Prize print edition is now held in the Victoria & Albert Museum Permanent Print Collection.